Moduli spaces M of self-dual SU(2) connections (“instantons”) over a compact Riemannian 4.manifold (hl, g) carry a natural L2 metric g, which is generally incomplete. For instantons of Pontryagin index 1 over a compact, simply connected, oriented, positive-definite base manifold, the completion M is Donaldson’s compactification; in fact the boundary of the completion is an isometric copy of (M,...