Masters of PixInsight
About the Doghouse Observatory
Our very own Astrodoc operates his observatory – the Doghouse – in Southern Ontario under Bortle 4 skies – good enough to capture stunning images with the right equipment and plenty of patience for good weather! Ron’s data sets were made with his 14” Celestron EDGE HD (focal length of almost 4 m), a QHY600 monochrome full-frame camera, and Optolong broadband and narrowband filters. Ron’s images come in at a resolution of 0.39” per pixel. The Doghouse’s latitude of about 43.5 degrees gives Ron access to some stunning northern deep-sky objects.
IC 1805
IC 1805 is also called The Heart Nebula, and is a large complex cloud of glowing gas in Cassiopeia. It is also catalogued as Sh2-190. This image shows a close up of the ‘Heart of the Heart.’ This object is about 7,500 light years away and is located in the Perseus arm of the Milky Way Galaxy.
M82
M82 is an irregular galaxy in Ursa Major, the Great Bear constellation. It has a high rate of forming new stars, and is known as a starburst galaxy. It’s relatively close by, at just 1 million light years. This long-focal length image reveals detail not often seen at lower resolution.
NGC 6914
Eyes in the Dark is Ron’s name for this image. It captures the region around NGC 6914, which is the left-most blue nebula in this image. The others are vdB 132 (center) and vdB 131 (right). Most of the glowing gas (red) and reflection nebula (blue) is about 6,000 light years away in the constellation Cygnus. NGC 6914 also has the designations LBN 274 and LBN 280.
NGC 7635
NGC 7635 lies in Cassiopeia and is also called the Bubble Nebula. The bubble’s glow is mainly due to excited atoms of hydrogen, which accounts for the mainly red hues of natural-color images. Oxygen and sulfur also contribute, and the other two versions are tone-mapped (i.e. false) colors made using sulfur, hydrogen and oxygen filters.
