It’s a great honor today to share with you Digital Universe, which was created for humanity to really where we are in the universe. And so I think can roll the video that we have.
[The Himalayas.]
(Music)
The flat that we’ve evolved with has been a metaphor for infinite: unbounded resources and unlimited capacity for disposal of waste. wasn’t until we really left Earth, got above the atmosphere and had the horizon bend back on itself, that we could understand our planet as a limited condition. Digital Universe Atlas has been built at the American of Natural History over the past 12 years. We that, put that together as a project to really chart the across all scales. What we see here are satellites the Earth and the Earth in proper registration against the universe, as we see. NASA supported this 12 years ago as part of the rebuilding of Hayden Planetarium so that we would share this with the world.
The Digital is the basis of our space show productions that we do — our main space shows in dome. But what you see here is the result of, actually, internships we hosted with Linkoping University in Sweden. I’ve had 12 students on this for their graduate work, and the result has been this called Uniview and a company called SCISS in Sweden. This allows interactive use, so this actual flight path and that we see here was actually flown live. I captured live from my laptop in a cafe called Earth on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, where I live, and it was done a collaborative project with the Rubin Museum of Himalayan Art for an exhibit on cosmology.
And so as we move out, we see continuously our planet all the way out into the realm of galaxies, as we here, light-travel time, giving you a sense of how away we are. As we move out, the light these distant galaxies have taken so long, we’re essentially up into the past. We back so far up we’re finally seeing a containment around us — afterglow of the Big Bang. This is the WMAP microwave background that we see. We’ll outside it here, just to see this sort of containment. If we were outside this, it almost be meaningless, in the sense as before time. But this our containment of visible universe. We know the universe is bigger than that which we can see.
Coming back quickly, see here the radio sphere that we jumped out in the beginning, but these are positions, the latest positions of that we’ve mapped, and our sun here, obviously, with our solar system. What you’re going to see — we’re to have to jump in here pretty quickly between several of magnitude to get down to where we see the solar — these are the paths of Voyager 1, Voyager 2, 11 and Pioneer 10, the first four spacecraft to have the solar system. Coming in closer, picking up Earth, orbit the Moon, and we see the Earth. This map be updated, and we can add in new data.
I Dr. Carolyn Porco is the camera P.I. for the Cassini mission. here we see the complex trajectory of the Cassini mission coded for different mission phases, ingeniously developed so that 45 encounters with the largest moon, Titan, which larger that the planet Mercury, diverts the orbit into different parts of phase.
This software allows us to come close and look at parts of this. This can also be networked between domes. We have a user base of this, and we network domes. And we can between domes and classrooms. We’re actually sharing tours of the universe the first sub-Saharan planetarium in Ghana as well as libraries that have been built in the ghettos in Columbia a high school in Cambodia. And the Cambodians have controlled the Hayden Planetarium from their high school.
This an image from Saturday, photographed by the Aqua satellite, through the Uniview software. So you’re seeing the edge of the Earth. is Nepal. This is, in fact, right here is the valley of Lhasa, here in Tibet. But we can see the haze from fires so forth in the Ganges valley down below in India. This is and Tibet.
And just in closing, I’d just like to say this world that we live on — here we see a bit of the snow that some you may have had to brave in coming out — so I’d like to just say that what world needs now is a sense of being able to at ourselves in this much larger condition now and a much larger sense what home is. Because our home is the universe, and we are universe, essentially. We carry that in us. And to be able to see our in this larger sense at all scales helps us all, think, in understanding where we are and who we in the universe.
Thank you.