My thanks again to you all, you're being very kind with your comments and I'm really pleased some of you have been inspired to go after your own drawing of the Orion Nebula.

Peter and Uwe, to add color to my original drawing I first photographed it with - my iPhone. Two reasons for that - first, it has plenty of resolution because I hold only about one meter from the drawing, which is good enough to capture every small detail, as well as the texture of the paper. But it's not so easy because it's difficult to get a photo that doesn't have a light gradient. So I wait for a sunny day and photograph the drawing in full sunshine. Even so, getting an even gradient is tricky.

Once I get a good photo, I email it to myself and bring it into Photoshop and select the Image drop down menu, then Adjustments and then Exposure, where I can adjust the exposure, offset and gamma to optimize the photo to most closely resemble my drawing. Then I invert it and go through the same steps to make it look as much like the view through the eyepiece as I can (Image, Adjustments, Invert).

I do this to for almost all my published drawings (magazine and online). To add color I followed the instructions from this webpage: https://creativepro.com/selectively-...lor-photoshop/ - and that's it. Nothing fancy, but like anything new it was time consuming. Too bad there are a lot more deep sky objects with more color so I can use this technique more often.

Peter, I'm really impressed you could the red color along the straight edge of the Huygens region (the "Bright Bar" as its called in the professional literature). It's a rare treat to see it all and I think you had very excellent conditions to see it so well, plus I think the much lower magnification you were using than I did helped. The first time I saw this color was by accident. I was observing the Huygens region at Steens Mountain in southwest Oregon, my favorite high altitude site (7400 feet) when I decided I didn't like the music coming from my iPhone.

Then remembering a tip I'd read on Cloudy Nights a few years ago (briefly flash your observing eye with white light to temporarily put that eye back in its daylight color sensing mode) I looked at my iPhone while changing the music, and rushed back to the eyepiece. Wow!!! The edge of the Bright Bar and a smaller area just southwest of the Trapezium (a shrouded star forming area called Orion S) both were distinctly orange, just as I depicted in my color drawings. I'd never even suspected this color in these two areas before and was completely taken by surprise. The color slowly faded as my eye became dark adapted again, but to my delight each time I've tried this technique it's worked.

Uwe, I had to work on my drawing under all kinds of observing conditions because there's too much to draw on the best nights. I used the less than great nights to get the proportions of the drawing correct and place the brightest features in their proper places. When a better night came along I was ready to add the finer, more subtle details without feeling rushed or overwhelmed. In that way, the 21.2 SQM nights with poor seeing and transparency were just as important as the 21.8 SQM nights under a great high altitude sky. Like you, my best observing sites are closed during the winter, so my best view always come in the early morning hours of late September or early October before they're closed.

Norman, I know what you mean about the difficulty of sketching without tracking, and I wish you good luck with your drawing of the Huygens region and adding color.

Jraymond, I've seen the red-ish color of the E star but the brownish tint of the B star. I hope to observe for the next two nights and will look for that, thanks for the tip!