WASI Monthly Members Meeting

Monthly members meetings are held at 7:00 PM Eastern time on the second Wednesday of the month at the Bear Branch Nature Center, 300 John Owings Rd. Westminster, MD and online via Zoom. There’s a demo or class at 7:00 PM, followed by the featured guest speaker presentation at 7:30 PM. Club updates and business meeting will follow.

Our February 11, 2026 meeting will feature a session on astrophotography hosted by club members Al Ansorge and Chris Bennett. Then, our main speaker is Dr. Mark Mitchell who will talk about Halton Arp and his Peculiar Galaxies.

Galaxies were called spiral nebulae, and the size of the universe was unknown until the mid-twentieth century. Classification systems of galaxy morphology were based on typical forms including Edwin Hubble’s 1926 system, which is still used today. It was known that about 2 - 8% of galaxies were not typical appearing, but rather peculiar looking. Halton Arp, an astronomer on the staff at the Palomar Observatory, published an Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies in 1966. Arp supported various heterodox theories about the appearance of peculiar galaxies, especially regarding quasars, but subsequent work is usually thought to support the idea that peculiar galaxies have been distorted by gravity from nearby interacting galaxies.

The talk will discuss this history, the Astronomical League’s Arp Peculiar Galaxy Observation Project, and show astrophotography of some peculiar galaxies.

Dr. Mitchell is a retired pathologist and amateur astronomer with a special interest in astrophotography. He is a member of the Delaware Astronomical Society. Some of his photographs are on Astrobin.

Meeting ID: 879 7384 1396
Passcode: 965007

---

Previous Meetings

13 August, 2025

Speaker: Dr. Lou Mayo, Voyager Legacy