I have not followed every detail of the astounding James Webb Space Telescope’s beginnings but I have been aware of some of the bigger events. I knew when it left Earth atop an Ariane 5 rocket on December 25, 2021, and I listened to reports of its eighteen gold-coated mirrors being unfolded and aligned. I marveled at those first images shared with the world on July 12, 2022. They were impressive on the tiny 6-inch screen on my phone, more so on my compact laptop’s 13-inch screen, and better yet on my small-by-modern-standards 42-inch TV. I need a bigger word than impressive now that I’ve seen some of them on a 72-foot OMNIMAX screen.

Deep Sky was released on October 20, 2023, and has been playing in several theaters spread around the world for a while. It began its run at Cincinnati’s Robert D. Lindner Family OMNIMAX® Theater with an 11:30 showing on Friday, February 2. I was there.

The front end of the movie covers the telescope’s construction, launch, and deployment. Some big numbers were tossed out concerning distance, number of people involved, etc. One that caught my attention was the count of Single Points of Failure (SPOFs). A SPOF is something that causes an entire system to fail if it does. It’s a concept I’m familiar with from my working days in software. A definition found online ends with “mission-critical systems should not have a SPOF”. According to Deep Sky, the deployment sequence for JWST had 344 of them. Not one caused a problem.`

There is a fair amount of computer-generated graphics in the film to illustrate the operation of the telescope in space and other impossible-to-capture views. They are wonderfully done and visually quite stunning on the big dome. Giant images from computers are great and may even equal those produced by the telescope in terms of visual impact but knowing that something you are seeing is an actual capture of something in the real world generates a whole different type of awe. 

There is a lot of awe present in the movie itself. It is apparent in every one of the program participants who put in an appearance. These are people who are truly excited to be part of a project that is advancing mankind’s knowledge of this world and their enthusiasm is more than obvious.

Much of the buzz generated by JWST comes from never-before-seen objects it has captured such as galaxies older than any previously recorded. These are well represented in Deep Sky. JWST has also provided better images of things that have been studied for some time. One example is the supernova of 1604 which was observed by Galileo. Another is the “Pillars of Creation” first imaged by the Hubble telescope in 1995. A JWST-generated image of the Pillars is in the movie poster that begins this article. A Hubble version can be seen here. NASA has made bunches of information about JWST and a huge number of images collected by the telescope available here. As I said, those images are truly impressive even on a display screen that fits in your pocket. You don’t have to attend a showing of Deep Sky to be gobsmacked by those awesome pictures but a 72-foot diameter dome jam-packed edge-to-edge with glowing galaxies will gobsmack you a bit differently and maybe a little harder.

While I was at the Cincinnati Museum Center, I took in Jane Goodall: Reasons for Hope which was showing ahead of Deep Sky and I snapped a picture of a promotion for the upcoming Pompeii: The Exhibition. All images in this article other than the first two are of a dynamic promotional display in the museum. I very much enjoyed the Goodall movie and there are some sections that take advantage of the IMAX format. I already have my ticket for the Pompeii exhibit which opens February 16. Coordinated with that opening is a return of
Volcanoes: The Fires of Creation which was the first movie shown in the Lindner Theater following its conversion to digital in 2018. I reported on seeing it here.

For both movies that I saw, the familiar psychedelic light tunnel video that traditionally kicks things off was replaced by a video that points out some of the theater’s features while entertaining eyes and ears much like the light tunnel. An attendant told me they have been using the new video for about a month and that the light tunnel is still around and used for some movies.