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