![\"Outdoing](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/186\/2022\/07\/main_image_deep_field_smacs0723-5mb-scaled.jpg\")
<\/a>Webb\u2019s image covers a patch of sky approximately the size of a grain of sand held at arm\u2019s length by someone on the ground \u2014 and reveals thousands of galaxies in a tiny sliver of an inconceivably vast universe
(Public domain image from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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I hope to see you at the annual FAIR conference this week<\/a>.\u00a0 It begins tomorrow (Wednesday) and will continue through my sorry performance late on Friday afternoon or relatively early on Friday evening.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n ***<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Last night, my wife and I shared a meal with sixteen of our closest friends in a restaurant in Draper and then attended a performance of Silent Sky<\/em><\/a> at the Hale Centre Theatre in Sandy.\u00a0 As far as I could tell, all of us thoroughly enjoyed it.\u00a0 I certainly did.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Silent Sky<\/em> is based on the remarkable true story of Henrietta Swan Leavitt (1868-1921)<\/a>, who, despite the sadly limited opportunities available to women at the time and although she died relatively young, made a major discovery while working at the Harvard College Observatory that was eventually used to prove that many other galaxies in exist in the universe beyond our own Milky Way.\u00a0 Eventually, \u201cLeavitt\u2019s Law\u201d was also fundamental to the work of Edwin Hubble in demonstrating that the universe is expanding.\u00a0 (Hubble said that she should have won the Nobel Prize.)\u00a0 A number of years ago, I read and really liked George Johnson\u2019s 2006 book Miss Leavitt\u2019s Stars: The Untold Story of the Woman Who Discovered How to Measure the Universe<\/em><\/a> and Dava Sobel\u2019s 2016 publication of\u00a0<\/span>The Glass Universe: How the Ladies of the Harvard Observatory Took the Measure of the Stars<\/em><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n By the way, the performance is accompanied by a display in the theater\u2019s lobby that includes replicas of the tools and the notebooks that were used to measure stars by the women portrayed in the play. The theater credits Dr. Sarah Lavalee and the Center for Astrophysics at Harvard University for their generous cooperation in granting access to the relevant archived materials.\u00a0 Moreover, the final image of the show appears courtesy of the James Webb Space Telescope and NASA.\u00a0 It was taken from among a group of Webb images that were only released to the public on 12 July 2022.\u00a0 On a personal note:\u00a0 My attendance at last night\u2019s performance of Silent Sky<\/em> couldn\u2019t possibly have been more timely for me than it was: Just yesterday, I published an article in Meridian Magazine<\/em><\/a> that is a reflection on one of the images from, well, the Webb Space Telescope:<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n