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