It’s a honor today to share with you The Digital Universe, was created for humanity to really see where we 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 has been metaphor for the infinite: unbounded resources and unlimited capacity for of waste. It 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 limited condition. The Digital Universe Atlas has been built at the American Museum of Natural History the past 12 years. We maintain that, put that together as a project to really chart the across all scales. What we see here are satellites around the Earth and the Earth in proper registration the universe, as we see. NASA supported this work 12 ago as part of the rebuilding of the Hayden so that we would share this with the world.
The Digital Universe is the of our space show productions that we do — main space shows in the dome. But what you see is the result of, actually, internships that we hosted Linkoping University in Sweden. I’ve had 12 students work on this for their graduate work, and the has been this software called Uniview and a company called SCISS in Sweden. software allows interactive use, so this actual flight path and movie we see here was actually flown live. I captured live from my laptop in a 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, see continuously from our planet all the way out into the realm galaxies, as we see here, light-travel time, giving you a of how far away we are. As we move out, the light from these galaxies have taken so long, we’re essentially backing up the past. We back so far up we’re finally seeing a around us — the afterglow of the Big Bang. This is the WMAP background 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 sense as before time. But our containment of the visible universe. We know the universe is bigger than which we can see.
Coming back quickly, we see here the radio sphere that we jumped out in the beginning, but these are positions, the latest positions exoplanets that we’ve mapped, and our sun here, obviously, with own solar system. What you’re going to see — we’re going have to jump in here pretty quickly between several orders of magnitude to get down to where see the solar system — these are the paths of 1, Voyager 2, Pioneer 11 and Pioneer 10, the first four spacecraft to have left the system. Coming in closer, picking up Earth, orbit of the Moon, and we see the Earth. map can be updated, and we can add in data.
I know Dr. Carolyn Porco is the camera P.I. for the Cassini mission. But here we see the trajectory of the Cassini mission color coded for different mission phases, ingeniously developed so that 45 with the largest moon, Titan, which is larger that the Mercury, diverts the orbit into different parts of mission phase.
This software allows us to close and look at parts of this. This software can also be networked between domes. We have growing user base of this, and we network domes. And we can between domes and classrooms. We’re actually sharing tours of the with the first sub-Saharan planetarium in Ghana as well as new libraries that have been built in ghettos in Columbia and 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, but the Uniview software. So you’re seeing the edge of the Earth. is Nepal. This is, in fact, right here is valley of Lhasa, right here in Tibet. But we can see haze from fires and so forth in the Ganges valley down in India. This is Nepal and Tibet.
And just in closing, I’d just like to say this beautiful that we live on — here we see a of the snow that some of you may have had to in coming out — so I’d like to just that what the world needs now is a sense of being able to look at ourselves in much larger condition now and a much larger sense of what home is. Because our home the universe, and we are the universe, essentially. We carry that in us. to be able to see our context in this sense at all scales helps us all, I think, in understanding where are and who we are in the universe.
Thank you.