Geometry of the Winger Pencil

Abstract

We investigate the moduli of genus 10 curves that are endowed with a faithful action of the icosahedral group $\mathcal{A}_5$. We show among other things that this has the structure of a Deligne-Mumford stack whose underlying coarse moduli space essentially consists of two copies of the pencil of plane sextics that was introduced by Winger in 1924, but with the unique unstable member (a triple conic) replaced by a smooth non-planar curve. The orbifold defined by any member has genus zero and comes with 4 orbifold points. We show that by numbering the points, we get a fine moduli space whose base is naturally a finite cover of $\Mcal_{0,4}$.