The James Webb Space Telescope is the culmination of thirty years of planning, twenty years of construction, and eleven billion dollars of funding. It is the most expensive and complex astronomical observatory ever built and it was designed specifically to perform the first systematic exploration of stars, galaxies, and black holes in the early universe. Luckily for us, this first systematic exploration is happening right now --- in our lives. I will introduce this flagship telescope and discuss some of the early, stunning, and sometimes tentative, discoveries we have 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. I 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".

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, using ground-and space-based telescopes, large cosmic surveys, and supercomputers. He specializes in modeling observations of distant galaxies and 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.

Founded in 1957, the Lehigh Valley Amateur Astronomical Society (LVAAS) is one of the oldest continuously-operating amateur astronomy organizations in the U.S. The mission of LVAAS is to promote the study of Astronomy and to maintain meeting spaces, observatories, and a planetarium.

LVAAS operates two astronomy sites: The South Mountain site in Salisbury Township is the headquarters of the Society. It has a planetarium with a Spitz A3P projector, a 21-foot dome, meeting space, the Red Shift store, library, workshop space, and three observatories. The Pulpit Rock site near Hamburg is LVAAS's members-only dark sky site. At 1,600 feet above sea level, the site features five observatories and a pad for members' scopes.

Members who receive training on the scopes may obtain keys to the observatories. LVAAS also maintains a rental "fleet" of telescopes that members may rent at low cost. Members also receive access to The Observer, our online newsletter, as well as reduced subscription prices to Sky and Telescope and Astronomy Magazine. If you want to learn more about astronomy and LVAAS, please join us at our next public star party.

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