I knew Michael for nearly forty years, and as I used to live in Colchester I visited him quite often. But John Vetterlein knew him for an even longer period, going back to when he lived nearby in the 1950s. Together we have written an appreciation of Michael’s life and work for the Journal. Ron Arbour has described his work and personality so eloquently that I won’t add much more here. I observed with Michael on several occasions, both for daytime and nighttime observations, and it was a great pleasure to have assisted him in photographing Hale-Bopp one evening in 1997. He was, as Ron wrote, a perfectionist as an observer and as a technician. A quiet but very friendly and hospitable man who will be sadly missed.
I am posting two solar images by Michael which show (A) a massive limb prominence and (B) some plages around an active sunspot group, taken by Michael with his 152 mm Cooke OG stopped to 100 mm, with a Barlow lens giving a focal length of 4.7 m, and a 0.7 Angstrom Daystar H alpha filter. These scans do not do justice to the originals, which have a resolution better than 2 arcseconds.
