SILENT SKY Comes to Mt Hood Repertory Theatre

Mt Hood Repertory Theatre is producing Silent Sky by Lauren Gundersen in partnership with OMSI.  Directed by Joellen Sweeney, the production will take place in the planetarium.   This will be the first time a play has been performed in the OMSI’s Kendall planetarium!  

Scheduled for the first week of March, the performance includes stunning celestial visuals designed by OMSI Planetarium director, Jim Todd, music by Jenny Giering performed live by pianist Jesse Preis, and glorious period costumes by Laura Streeter.

Silent Sky tells the story of pioneering astronomer Henrietta Swan Leavitt and explores a woman’s place in society during a time of immense scientific and heart-bound discoveries.  A decade before women gained the right to vote, Henrietta Leavitt and her fellow women “computers” transformed the science of astronomy.  With music and math bursting forth onstage, Henrietta and her peers change how we understand the heavens and Earth.

At the Harvard Observatory Leavitt worked as a computer in the early 1900s.  Harvard would not allow her to use the telescope because she was a woman so she analyzed the glass plate images taken with the telescope.  Leavitt found 2,400 new variable stars and made important discoveries about their fluctuating brightness, enabling fellow scientists to map the Milky Way and beyond.  Her analysis is the foundation for the first system for measuring the size of the universe.  

She wrote textbooks that every astronomer must read.  Hubble came about ten years after her and much of his work is based on hers.   But, of course, there are no telescopes named after her because...

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