Ron Buta
Astronomy captured my fancy one very clear night
over Baltimore, Maryland in 1965. I was sitting
on a couch by a window and happened to notice a
bright star. I got up and went out to look at it.
I recall standing on the back porch and for the
first time noticing the night sky. I had a small
constellation book and determined that the bright
star that originally caught my eye was Sirius. From
then on, it seemed that astronomy was all I thought
about. I received my PhD in astronomy from the University
of Texas at Austin in 1984. My dissertation was
titled "The Structure and Dynamics of Ringed Galaxies",
and my supervisor was Gerard de Vaucouleurs. From
1984-1986 I was a postdoctoral fellow at the Australian
National University in Canberra and worked at the
Mount Stromlo Observatory. From 1986-1988 I returned
as a post-doc to the University of Texas to work
with Gerard and Antoinette de Vaucouleurs on the
Third Reference Catalogue of Bright Galaxies. In
1989, I joined the faculty of the Department of
Physics and Astronomy of the University of Alabama
in Tuscaloosa.
Since 1984 I have maintained a constant interest
in the problems of the morphology and dynamics of
galaxies with a special emphasis on ring and bar
phenomena. I have always been tantalized by the
subtle aspects of these features that can be linked
to specific aspects of internal dynamics. NGC 4622
caught my eye years ago as an especially good example
of a ringed galaxy without a bar, and one of my
main motivations for the present study was to examine
star formation in its ring, which I suspect was
generated by an interaction with another galaxy.
After I arrived at Alabama, Gene Byrd introduced
me to the possibility of leading spiral structure
in NGC 4622, which made the galaxy even more interesting,
since leading spirals had not been definitively
established in any galaxy up to that time. He had
noticed in a high quality, commercially-available
NOAO photograph that in addition to the two outer
spiral arms which wind outward in a clockwise sense,
NGC 4622 has a third arm inside its ring that spirals
outward in a counterclockwise sense. If NGC 4622
is a normal rotating disk galaxy, then one set of
arms must be leading. The question was, which set?
Although we carried out extensive ground-based observations
to try and answer this question, we were not able
to determine which way the galaxy was rotating,
and the question was left hanging for more than
10 years until we obtained our HST data.
In addition to my work on specific galaxies, I
am actively involved in a new galaxy morphology
project titled
The De Vaucouleurs Atlas of Galaxies. The atlas
is intended to document, with modern digital images,
the de Vaucouleurs revised Hubble galaxy classification
system, and will be published in 2004 by Cambridge
University Press. I also dabble in paleontology
and am co-editing a monograph titled
"Pennsylvanian Footprints in the Black Warrior Basin
of Alabama". The monograph will document the
morphology and other characteristics of 310 million
year old fossil footprints that were recently discovered
in an abandoned surface coal mine 70 miles north
of Tuscaloosa. The tracks were made by primitive
amphibians and other animals that walked or crept
along an ancient tidal mud flat near a Coal Age
forest. As an astronomer, it is easy for me to relate
to geology and paleontology because of the vast
timespans of the various processes we observe. For
me living in Alabama, a state with a rich natural
history, the story of life on Earth is as interesting
as the story of the stars. |
