I was thinking a lot before commiting myself to this drawing. The reason was that I had never seen these nebulae before. VdB 14 and 15 are two faint reflexion nebulae around the 4.5 magnitude stars CE and CS Cam. I drew the whole star field from Kerepes. I didn't even try to see the nebulae - it is hopeless because of the light pollution. Then the moment of truth came on a 2013 January weekend in Ágasvár. Fortunately though barely but I was able to see the nebulae. I dared to start the drawing because I took a look at some photos of the area and I saw that only one out of the two bright stars has a nebulosity around it. So the other one is a perfect control star. Furthermore one of the fragments of the nebulae is not connected to any bright star. This fragment, VdB 14 was just visible with 40x enlargement. VdB 15 around the bright star was sort-of detectable with 16x enlargement. Both nebulae exhibit some minor details. But with such a small telescope these reflexion nebulae are a synonym of faintness.

Comparison with the photograph

The photo on the left, courtesy of Bob Franke was made using a Takahashi FSQ-106ED telescope. Bob's original photograph has been cropped and my inverted drawing rotated to show a similar area of the sky.

The beauty of the nebulae was visually almost not visible at all. The brightest areas of the nebulae were barely detectable in the eyepiece. By comparing the stars of this beautiful Milky-Way field you can see the inaccuracies of the drawing.