Peter Kennett

01/31/2026

Sandhill Cranes await sunrise at the Bernardo Wildlife refuge.

01/04/2025

Here's my second image of the year - the wonderful barred spiral galaxy NGC 2903 in the constellation of Leo. NGC 2903's swirling whirlpool of stars spans 80,000 light-years, slightly less than our own Milky Way and is located at a distance of some 25 million light-years. At the top of this photo, you can see the dwarf elliptical galaxy UGC 5086 at the distance around 1.86 million ly away from its parent galaxy.

Celestron C11 EdgeHD @ f/7
ASI 1600MM Pro @ -15C
iOptron CEM120 EC2 unguided
Moonlite Litecrawler
Baader LRGB filters

Controlled and aquired with KStars
Processed with Pixinsight.

Red: 60 sec x 162
Green: 60 sec x 121
Blue: 60 sec x 145
Lum: 60 sec x 134

06/17/2024

A few miles south of Fox Glacier lies Lake Matheson, a popular lake that tourists love to visit for the reflections it offers of New Zealand's highest peaks - Mount Cook and Mount Tasman.

The waters of Lake Matheson are dark brown due to dissolved tannins from ferns, which create an ideal reflective surface. However, the vast majority of tourists never see the perfect reflections because soon after sunrise, surface winds cause ripples which ruin the reflection. Also, you have to hike 30 minutes through a forest to get to this side of the lake. So If you want to see the mirror, you need to arrive before sunrise and hike in the dark for 1/2 an hour. Or stay late until after sunset and then hike back out after dark. In the early morning, you may have the problem of early morning mists - but those can be photogenic too. A variety of cloud cover, fog, and seasonal changes means that no two photos are alike, and even seconds apart can look different.

To get this shot I woke my wife up at 5AM and drove out to this area. She crawled into the back of the van and went back to sleep. I put on my thermal clothes (it was quite chilly) and hiked 1/2 hour in the dark to this part of the lake. When I got there, there were five other photographers already waiting for sunrise. It was absolutely silent. No one talked or even whispered. All you could hear were shutters clicking. And birds.

I took several dozen photos as the sky brightened, but then suddenly everyone gasped as a sliver of sunlight broke over the mountains and lit up a layer of early morning mist. The effect only lasted a minute before it disappeared and soon after a light breeze destroyed the mirror.

On the hike back out, new photographers were just arriving at the trail head. They missed this shot.

Prints available at:

Lake Matheson Morning by Peter Kennett

04/16/2024

I finally got the time to grab my eclipse pictures pff my camera.

03/03/2024

Here's an image I have been working on for a few weeks, but's very low in the sky and the weather has been acting up lately. The winds tonight are 40 MPH so I cent even ope my dome. Anyway here's what I have so far:

This celestial firestorm is the blazing wreckage of a collision between two spiral galaxies. The two galaxies, whose bright yellow cores appear to the lower left and upper right of center, began their fateful confrontation a few hundred million years ago. Formally known as NGC 4038 and NGC 4039, the pair is nicknamed the Antennae Galaxies because of two long streamers of stars, gas, and dust that extend from the crash site.

The cosmic smashup has pulled dark dust into long strands stretching from one galaxy to the other. It has also compressed huge clouds of gas and dust, igniting a rash of new star formation within the galaxies. Astronomers estimate that billions of new stars will form as the two galaxies complete their collision and eventually merge into one galaxy.

The merging galaxies contain more than a thousand young "super star clusters." Astronomers believe many of these clusters will eventually disperse, but the largest ones will survive to become giant, spherical-shaped stellar groupings called globular clusters, like those that reside in the outskirts of our own galaxy. Most globular clusters contain ancient stars and were thought to be relics of a galaxy's earliest days, but recent observations suggest that globular clusters can also be born more recently from galactic mergers like this.

About 65 million light-years away, the Antennae Galaxies make up one of the closest pairs of colliding galaxies to us. Because many (if not all) present-day, large galaxies are thought to have grown from smaller galaxies that collided and merged, studying nearby collisions such as the Antennae Galaxies helps astronomers understand how galaxies evolved over the universe's history. It might even provide insight into our own spiral galaxy's future collision with the large, spiral Andromeda Galaxy.

02/23/2024

Here's my latest work from the New Mexico Cosmos observatory.

This is part of IC 410, an emission nebula located in the constellation of Auriga at an estimated distance of 10,000 light-years. The nebula itself surrounds a young galactic cluster of stars (not seen here) that was formed in the interstellar cloud about 4 million years ago. The hot, bright cluster of stars energize the glowing gasses in the area and the intense radiation and stellar winds of the cluster have sculpted the two tadpole-shaped structures located in the lower right of this image. Composed of denser, cooler globules and knots of gas and dust, the tadpoles are about 10 light-years long and is a stellar nursery of ongoing star formation. Their "heads" are outlined by bright edges of ionized gas while their tails trail away from the cluster's central region, off screen to the lower left.

To capture this image, I combined three images that captured ionized Hydrogen Alpha, Oxygen III and Sulfur II - the three elements that most easily showcase this nebula complex. I then added in the stars which I captured using regular white light (red, green and blue).

Scope: Celestron C11 EdgeHD f/7
Mount: iOptron CEM120 EC2
Camera: ASI 1600MM Pro chilled to -15C
Focuser/Rotator: Moonlite Litecrawler
Filters: Baader narrow band and RGB
Guidance: Lodestar X2 via Celestron Off Axis Guider

Control system: Kstars OSX
Post processing: PixInsight

Exposures:
- Ha: 60 x 5 minutes.
- OIII: 120 x 5 minutes.
- SII: 80 x 5 minutes.
- Red: 60 x 1 minute.
- Green: 60 x 1 minute.
- Blue: 80 x 1 minute.

12/06/2023

I'm working on improving my planetary imaging this week. I still have a long ways to go to get the level of detail I want - but at least I see some progress. Here's Jupiter from last night.

07/23/2023

This is the faint Object NGC 7635 (Bubble Nebula), located about 7,100 light-years away in the constellation Cassiopeia. Its originator star burns a million times brighter than the Sun and produces powerful gas outflows called stellar winds that howl at more than four million miles per hour. Over time, the winds have pushed nearby gas and dust outward, forming a layer around the star that is denser in some areas than others....

This is the faint Object NGC 7635 (Bubble Nebula), located about 7,100 light-years away in the constellation Cassiopeia. Its originator star burns a million times brighter than the Sun and produces…

04/18/2023

Here's a galaxy I am still working on, but I wont be able to finish it for a couple of weeks. This is NGC 3628, also known as the Hamburger Galaxy, an unbarred spiral galaxy about 35 million light-years away in the constellation Leo. Its most conspicuous feature is the broad and obscuring band of dust located along the outer edge of its spiral arms, effectively transecting the galaxy to the view from Earth.

Scope: Celestron C11 EdgeHD @ f/7 (1960mm focal length)
Camera: ASI1600MM Pro cooled to -15C
Mount: iOptron CEM120 EC2
Focuser/Rotator: Moonlite Litecrawler
Guiding: Celestron OAG with Lodestar X2
Filters: Baader 36mm filters
Control: KStars 3.6.4 (OSX)

Exposures:
-Luminance: 64 x 3 minutes
-Red: 30 x 3 minutes
-Green: 30 x 3 minutes
-Blue: 45 x 3 minutes
Post processing: PixInsight and Photoshop

Captured from my home observatory in central New Mexico.

02/16/2023

M101 – the Pinwheel Galaxy. It is really quite beautiful, full of color, structure and detail, and located 25 million light-years away from Earth in the constellation Ursa Major.

The giant spiral disk of stars, dust and gas is 170,000 light-years across — nearly twice the diameter of our galaxy, the Milky Way. M101 is estimated to contain at least one trillion stars. The galaxy’s spiral arms are sprinkled with large regions of star-forming nebulas. These nebulas are areas of intense star formation within giant molecular hydrogen clouds. Brilliant, young clusters of hot, blue, newborn stars trace out the spiral arms.

Scope: Celestron C11 edgeHD @ f/7
Mount: iOptron CEM120 EC2
Camera: ASI 1600Mm Pro -15C
Focuser: Moonlite Litecrawler
Guider: Celesron OAG
Guide Camera: Lodestar X2
Control: KStars (MacOSX)
Post: Pixinsight

Exposures and Filters: (9 hours)
- Red (30 x 3 minutes)
- Green (30 x 3 minutes)
- Blue (30 x 3 minutes)
- Luminance: 134 x 3 minutes
- Hydrogen Alpha: 28 x 5 minutes