All Space Considered – July 2026
Griffith Observatory broadcasts this public program live from the Leonard Nimoy Event Horizon Theater on the third Thursday of every month. Join the Observatory's curatorial staff as they examine and explain the most-talked-about subjects in astronomy and space science. It is free to attend in-person or stream on YouTube.
Upcoming All Space Considered
On the third Thursday of every month, Griffith Observatory broadcasts this public program live from the Leonard Nimoy Event Horizon Theater (find it on page 3 of the map). It is free to attend in-person or stream on YouTube. Foundation members receive priority seating to All Space Considered, among other benefits. By joining the Foundation, you take part in supporting Observatory programs like this one.
To see previous All Space Considered programs, visit our YouTube playlist.
This Month's Headlines
- Space News
- Amazing Astrophotography
- Out to Launch
- Guest segment with Joel Leja, Associate Professor of Astronomy & Astrophysics at Penn State University
Guest Speaker
JOEL LEJA is the Dr. Keiko Miwa Ross Mid Career Endowed Faculty Chair and an Associate Professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Penn State University. He researches how galaxies like the Milky Way form over cosmic time with ground-and space-based telescopes, large cosmic surveys, and supercomputers. He specializes in modeling observations of distant galaxies and also in data-intensive methodologies applied to astrophysics, including modeling individual galaxies (e.g., Prospector) and galaxy population modeling (mass function, star-forming sequence, and other scaling relationships). Joel received his Ph.D in Astronomy from Yale University under Dr. Pieter van Dokkum in 2016 and was an NSF Astronomy & Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard and Smithsonian with Dr. Charlie Conroy until 2020. He was named a Clarivate Highly Cited Researcher in 2023, 2024, and 2025 (top 1% of cited researchers in astrophysics), and awarded Yale University’s Brouwer Prize in 2019 for a PhD thesis of unusual merit.
Guest Topic
The James Webb Space Telescope is the culmination of 30 years of planning, 20 years of construction, and 11 billion dollars of funding. It is the most expensive and complex astronomical observatory ever built and it was designed specifically to perform the first deep exploration of the first stars, galaxies, and black holes right after the big bang. Luckily for us, this first exploration is happening right now—in our lives. Dr. Leja will introduce this flagship telescope and discuss some of the early, stunning, and sometimes tentative discoveries made in Webb‘s first deep fields by measuring the ancient first light from galaxies and black holes originating near the edge of the observable universe. He will in particular discuss the new, mysterious, very bright, and seemingly impossible objects at the edge of the universe which have been puzzling all of us: “Little red dots.”