About the images . . .

This image of the moon was taken through Bob Hires' Questar telescope in July 1982, just about the start of the penumbral phase of a midnight total eclipse of the moon. Bob Hires' grandfather founded Hires Root Beer company. In attendence at this eclipse observation was myself, my wife, Bruce Gotwols, and Bob Hires. We stayed up most of the night and ate eclipse cookies and cheese fondue.

The original image was taken on film and later entered into a computer through a video camera. At a later time I removed a small amount of penumbral shading on the upper left of the image, and also removed a bit of geometric distortion which had crept in along the way. This image is now used in my Lunar Almanac Calendars with added shading to represent the lunar phase for each day of the month. A few astronomy clubs around the country use these calendars in their monthly newsletters.

The image of the galaxy cluster 2244-02 was taken through the Hubble Space Telescope on April 25, 1992, in the early afternoon. The double image was done by Amy Davis and appeared in the Baltimore Sun on May 16, 1992 in an article by Erik Nelson. This cluster was my target as the second amateur astronomer to use the Hubble Space Telescope (Jim Secosky was the first, he looked at Jupiter's moon Io).

The noteworthy feature of this cluster is the arc shaped object. I came up with a computer model of two colliding galaxies in which the collision debris matched the size, shape, and location of the arc almost perfectly. I also did some computations of possible star formation in the arc which matched well its observed brightness and color.

The Hubble project was an attempt to find traces of disturbances that would be expected from the modeled collision. The images were obtained before the optical correction to the Hubble. The target is very faint so a wideband (visual) filter was used for the exposure, this prevented effective deconvolution of the image. The aberrations in the telescope smeared the light out and gave a loss of brightness in the image. No trace of the expected collision artifacts could be detected in the image.

The published, and accepted, model of the arc is that it is a gravitional lens image of a galaxy beyond the cluster. Other such lens arcs have been seen, although not as large as this one. I still believe my collision model may be correct for this one case, but so far have not been able to prove it.