Digital Astronomical Sketching

Resources
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I own a 150mm dobsonian reflector telescope at home (Looks like a canon) and I wanted to know if anyone here has ever heard about astronomical sketching. When astrophotography is not a viable option for an amateur astronomer who wants to capture what he sees through his telescope in an image, he may decide to make a sketch of what he sees through his telescope on a pad of paper. Due to the risk of potentially blinding out night vision, red light is used to illuminate the paper when sketching an image seen through a telescope. The image may either be drawn as a negative on white paper with a pencil and later inverted in an image editing program or the image may be drawn on black paper with a white pencil on site.

I have been wondering if it is feasible to use Krita on a tablet computer to sketch images seen through a telescope on screen. My major concern would be risking losing one’s night vision when staring at a bright computer monitor. This risk could be reduced by using a custom “night vision” theme that displays all color as red and by creating the image in grayscale when working outside. I myself have not done much astronomical sketching other than sketches of bright planets and the moon, but I have read several articles on this topic in Astronomy monthly magazine covering this topic. Mostly, the authors for these articles use physical drawing media other than for inverting the color of negative drawings, but it might be possible to use Krita for astronomical sketching with some tweaking.

I can’t find any sketches I have made in the past so I will share a link to a YouTube video explaining the process:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=QDC3R39AcSA&feature=youtu.be

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3

You’re not alone in not having a tablet PC or pen display. My current graphics tablet is a 12 year old Wacom Bamboo Fun CTE-450. The small tablet is fine when working at the computer inside, but I’ll eventually need to buy a tablet PC or a pen display monitor if I want to comfortably make astronomical sketches outside.

A red night vision theme would definitely be useful in using Krita outside at night next to a telescope. Both of my sky atlas apps on my phone include a night vision mode to make the programs easier to use at night without severely affecting night vision.

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I wonder if there is a way to get gray scale to display as red color. So far the results look promising.

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Hi!

Even if I’m late, perhaps I have a helpful tip. Replace the color picker of Krita with the Docker plugin “Pigment.O” from “EyeOdin” to “gain” more darkness. Eventually it is worth a try?

Michelist

  1. Link to the topic “Pigment.O” here on Krita-Artists
  2. Link to the “Pigment.O” GitHub repository by “EyeOdin”
  3. Link to the direct download of the plugin from the above repository
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This is fixed in 5.0

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I’m wondering if a version of this theme can now be tested in 5.0 to see if it works well in low light conditions. Hopefully there won’t be too many glitches to work around.