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John Brown Still Lives! America\u27s Reckoning With Violence, Equality, and Change
Slave Against Slave: Plantation Violence In The Old South
The Nuance of Violence: Reassessing Intraracial Conflict on the Plantation No matter how well researched, no matter how beautifully written, our understanding of American slavery often takes the form of furtive glimpses through moving keyholes. When we are granted a view, our subject quickly disap...
A Lensed Arc in the Low Redshift Cluster Abell 2124
We report the discovery of an arc-like object 27" from the center of the cD
galaxy in the redshift cluster A2124. Observations with the Keck II
telescope reveal that the object is a background galaxy at ,
apparently lensed into an arc of length \sim 8 \farcs5 and total R magnitude
. The width of the arc is resolved; we estimate it to be
0\farcs6 after correcting for seeing. A lens model of the A2124 core mass
distribution consistent with the cluster galaxy velocity dispersion reproduces
the observed arc geometry and indicates a magnification factor \gta 9. With
this magnification, the strength of the [OII] \lambda 3727 line implies a
star-formation rate of SFR \sim 0.4 h^{-2}\msun yr^{-1}$. A2124 thus appears to
be the lowest redshift cluster known to exhibit strong lensing of a distant
background galaxy.Comment: 6 pages using emulateapj.sty; 4 Postscript figures; Figure 4 uses
color. Accepted for publication, but ApJ Letters' new policy of counting data
images makes the manuscript too long; will appear in main journal. This final
version has minor correction
Maxwell currents beneath thunderstorms
Analyses of single station measurements of the Maxwell current density (Jm) made under Florida thunderstorms during the summer of 1981 have been completed. The results of these analyses indicate that: (1) Jm is usually dominated by the displacement current component when the electric field is close to zero; (2) Jm is steady with time in the intervals between lightning flashes; (3) Jm is not altered significantly by lightning; and (4) the average value of Jm changes slowly and over time scales that are comparable to those required for storm development. Maps have also been derived of the surface Maxwell current density for a number of the Florida TRIP (76-78) storms using field mill data to estimate Jm from the displacement current density. Studies show that these maps provide a good indication of the location and relative intensity of the storm current generators, and area-integrations of the current contours provide estimates of the total storm currents
Optical and IR Photometry of Globular Clusters in NGC1399: Evidence for Color-Metallicity Nonlinearity
We combine new Wide Field Camera~3 IR Channel (WFC3/IR) F160W (H) imaging
data for NGC1399, the central galaxy in the Fornax cluster, with archival F475W
(g), F606W (V), F814W (I), and F850LP (z) optical data from the Advanced Camera
for Surveys (ACS). The purely optical g-I, V-I, and g-z colors of NGC1399's
rich globular cluster (GC) system exhibit clear bimodality, at least for
magnitudes . The optical-IR I-H color distribution appears
unimodal, and this impression is confirmed by mixture modeling analysis. The
V-H colors show marginal evidence for bimodality, consistent with bimodality in
V-I and unimodality in I-H. If bimodality is imposed for I-H with a double
Gaussian model, the preferred blue/red split differs from that for optical
colors; these "differing bimodalities" mean that the optical and optical-IR
colors cannot both be linearly proportional to metallicity. Consistent with the
differing color distributions, the dependence of I-H on g-I for the matched GC
sample is significantly nonlinear, with an inflection point near the trough in
the g-I color distribution; the result is similar for the I-H dependence on g-z
colors taken from the ACS Fornax Cluster Survey. These g-z colors have been
calibrated empirically against metallicity; applying this calibration yields a
continuous, skewed, but single-peaked metallicity distribution. Taken together,
these results indicate that nonlinear color-metallicity relations play an
important role in shaping the observed bimodal distributions of optical colors
in extragalactic GC systems.Comment: 15 pages, 12 figures, accepted for publication in the Astrophysical
Journa
Principal Component Analysis of the Time- and Position-Dependent Point Spread Function of the Advanced Camera for Surveys
We describe the time- and position-dependent point spread function (PSF)
variation of the Wide Field Channel (WFC) of the Advanced Camera for Surveys
(ACS) with the principal component analysis (PCA) technique. The time-dependent
change is caused by the temporal variation of the focus whereas the
position-dependent PSF variation in ACS/WFC at a given focus is mainly the
result of changes in aberrations and charge diffusion across the detector,
which appear as position-dependent changes in elongation of the astigmatic core
and blurring of the PSF, respectively. Using >400 archival images of star
cluster fields, we construct a ACS PSF library covering diverse environments of
the observations (e.g., focus values). We find that interpolation of a
small number () of principal components or ``eigen-PSFs'' per exposure
can robustly reproduce the observed variation of the ellipticity and size of
the PSF. Our primary interest in this investigation is the application of this
PSF library to precision weak-lensing analyses, where accurate knowledge of the
instrument's PSF is crucial. However, the high-fidelity of the model judged
from the nice agreement with observed PSFs suggests that the model is
potentially also useful in other applications such as crowded field stellar
photometry, galaxy profile fitting, AGN studies, etc., which similarly demand a
fair knowledge of the PSFs at objects' locations. Our PSF models, applicable to
any WFC image rectified with the Lanczos3 kernel, are publicly available.Comment: Accepted to PASP. To appear in December issue. Figures are degraded
to meet the size limit. High-resolution version can be downloaded at
http://acs.pha.jhu.edu/~mkjee/acs_psf/acspsf.pd
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