This lecture will be webcast on Air and Space Live. 

7:30 pm           Meet the lecturer
8:00 pm           Lecture begins
9:00 pm           Stargazing in the Phoebe Waterman Haas Public Observatory - canceled due to clouds

The Hubble Space Telescope revolutionized the discovery and study of extraordinarily distant and very young galaxies. Hubble's cameras have let us look back through 96% of all time to see galaxies in their infancy, just 500 million years after the Big Bang. The recent remarkable discovery by Hubble and Spitzer of a galaxy, just 400 million years after the Big Bang was far beyond what we ever expected Hubble could do.  These latest Hubble and Spitzer results suggest that the more powerful James Webb Space Telescope may well reveal for us examples of the "first galaxies".

In this lecture, Garth Illingworth, professor emeritus in the department of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of California Santa Cruz, will provide insights on the amazing results from Hubble and Spitzer, and will give his take on JWST, the most challenging and ambitious astronomy mission ever undertaken. He will discuss how, after 15 years of astonishing progress with Hubble and Spitzer, JWST is poised to provide even more remarkable exploration of the realm of the very first galaxies at "Cosmic Sunrise".

This lecture is free but tickets are required. Please reserve your tickets using the form below. Please note: new ticket requests for this lecture may be for overflow seating in the Museum's Albert Einstein Planetarium.

The John N. Bahcall Lecture is sponsored by the Space Telescope Science Institute and the Hubble Space Telescope Project/NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.