July 22nd, 2022 8:30pm
Astronomy Speaker: Dr. Garth Illingworth
Lecture Information
Dr. Garth Illingworth (UC Santa Cruz)
The Webb Telescope Comes to Life
Dr. Garth Illingworth was the leader of the early work, 1987-1992, on the Next Generation Space Telescope (NGST) that is now known as the James Webb Space Telescope. While Deputy-Director of the Space Telescope Science Institute, he was one of original initiators, with Peter Stockman and Pierre Bely, of a large 8-m class passively-cooled IR space telescope. He chaired the UV-Optical in Space Panel of the 1990 Decadal Survey that recommended a 6-m passively-cooled large space telescope that ultimately became the JWST. He shepherded the project through many aspects of its long development and when he finally celebrated Webb’s launch on December 25th, 2021, he was the last original architect still involved.
Garth began his illustrious career exploring for the earliest galaxies in the first 1- 2 billion years of the Universe, first on globular clusters and nearby ellipticals, but with the advent of the powerful instruments on Hubble, he transitioned to working on distant galaxies. This search for the earliest galaxies over the last 15-20 years has been enabled by the world’s most powerful telescopes, the Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes and the Keck telescope on Mauna Kea.
Garth is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He was a Miller Fellow at UC Berkeley and in 2010 was awarded an honorary Doctor of Science degree at the University of Western Australia. He is the recipient of the 2016 American Astronomical Society Lancelot M. Berkeley New York Community Trust Prize for his work on the most-distant galaxies viewed with Hubble, and was a plenary speaker for this award at the 2017 meeting of the American Astronomical Society. He was the 2018 Bahcall Lecturer, giving a series of invited talks at the Space Telescope Science Institute, the Goddard Space Flight Center and the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. He is a Fellow of the American Astronomical Society.
Ticket Information
Tickets can be purchased at ucsctickets.com starting April 13th, 2022 at Noon.
Join Friends of Lick Observatory (FoLO) and Get Tickets Early
If you’d like to purchase tickets as early as noon on April 6th, 2022, join our Friends of Lick Observatory (FoLO) program by March 1st, 2022. As a thank you for supporting the observatory, you’ll get special access to purchase tickets before they go on sale for the general public.
More information about tickets and pricing is available here.
Program Information
| 7:30 pm | Doors Open | Brief Telescope Visits |
| 8:30 pm | Science Talk, Lecture Hall | History Talk, Great Refractor Telescope Dome |
| 9:30 pm | Science Talk (repeated), Lecture Hall | Telescope Viewings |
| 10:30 pm | History Talk (repeated), Lecture Hall | Telescope Viewings |
| 1:00 am | Doors Close |
Gift shop is open from 7:30pm until 11:30pm.
More general information about the event is available at Evening with the Stars.