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