History of this Page
The images on this page were taken by Dr. Pinkney and Monique Aller (U.
Michigan)
at the MDM Observatory in Arizona (see "Technical Information on
Images" link). These data were important to carry out several
funded science programs of the Nuker Team,
(PI D. Richstone, U. Michigan). of which Drs. Pinkney and Aller are
members. The programs all involved supermassive black
holes in nearby galaxies. The high resolution imaging and
spectroscopy provided by the Hubble Space Telescope were at the crux of
the proposals. However, ground-based CCD imaging was also
required. We sought to measure
the masses of black holes in the nuclei of galaxies, and then relate
those
masses to global properties of the galaxy (e.g., morphology).
This page was conceived by Dr. Jason Pinkney (ONU, Dept of Physics and
Astronomy). Since then, Dr. Pinkney has had several enthusiastic
students to work on the page and its many images. These
include (in chronological order): Rachel Brown (Wesleyan
University), Mike Garee (ONU), Brian Sacash (ONU), and Peter Kircher (ONU).
Many hours were spent converting the FITS format CCD images into JPEGs
and constructing the web page. Thank you students!
Future Plans: the web page will be redone using an image map
instead of a large table of icons.
We hope that amateur astronomers
and galaxy enthusiasts everywhere discover
this page. It is a payback to the US taxpayer for their indirect
support of
the sciences and, especially black hole research.
Enjoy!