ITHACA, N.Y. -- Margaret J. Geller, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, will deliver the Bethe Lectures at Cornell University the week of May 6.

Geller will give a free public lecture on Tuesday, May 7, at 8 p.m. Her talk, "So Many Galaxies . . . So Little Time," will be in Schwartz Auditorium, Rockefeller Hall, and it will include a state-of-the-art graphic voyage through the nearby universe. Geller has produced a film of the same name that depicts the way a scientific group works. She will describe the use of very large telescopes to explore the distant universe in an effort to understand the origins of patterns in the universe.

Geller also will give a physics colloquium on the large-scale structure of the universe on Monday, May 6, and an astrophysics colloquium on cosmology on Wednesday, May 8. Her visit is sponsored by the Physics Department and the College of Arts and Sciences.

Professor of astronomy at Harvard University and a senior scientist at the Center for Astrophysics, Geller has been mapping the nearby universe for the past 15 years and has produced the most extensive pictures yet.

A member of the National Academy of Sciences and American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Geller was a recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 1990. With John Huchra, she shared the American Association for the Advancement of Science Newcomb-Cleveland Award.

Geller, at Harvard since 1977, earned a doctorate in 1975 from Princeton University and an undergraduate degree from the University of California at Berkeley in 1970.

The Bethe Lecture Series, established by the Physics Department and the College of Arts and Sciences, honors Hans A. Bethe, Cornell professor emeritus of physics, whose description of the nuclear processes powering the sun earned him a Nobel Prize in physics in 1967. The lectures have been given annually since 1977.