of light by the deep gravitational potential of galaxy clusters
can be harnessed to greatly increase the effective collecting
area of astronomical telescopes. Mark Swinbank (Ph.D. student at
the University of Durham, U.K.) and his international team used
Gemini's Multi-Object Spectrograph with Integral Field Unit
(GMOS-IFU) on The Frederick C. Gillett Gemini Telescope (Gemini
North) to exploit the rich galaxy cluster A 2218. They used A
2218 as a magnifying glass to observe distant background
galaxies at a comparable level of detail to galaxies at redshift
z ~ 0.1. This work is part of Mark's Ph. D. project––to explore
the Tully-Fisher relation and chemical abundance gradients in
distant Figure 1. Optical image of the massive galaxy cluster A
2218 with the lensed galaxy studied by Gemini indicated with the
yellow arrow. This image was obtained with the Hubble Space
Telescope. Swinbank et al., report on their first result of
spatially-resolved [OII]3727 nebular gas emission from a lensed
galaxy at a redshift z