A 3D atlas of the universe Carter Emmart
it’s a great honor today to share with
you the digital universe which was
created for humanity to really see where
we are in the universe and so I think we
can roll the video that we have
the flat horizon that we’ve evolved with
has been a metaphor for the infinite
unbounded resources and unlimited
capacity for disposal of waste it wasn’t
until we really left earth got above the
atmosphere and seen the horizon been
back on itself that we could understand
our planet as a limited condition
the digital universe Atlas has been
built at the American Museum of Natural
History over the past twelve years and
we maintain that put that together as a
project to really chart the universe
across all scales what we see here are
satellites around the earth and the
earth in proper registration against the
universe as we see NASA supported this
work twelve years ago as part of the
rebuilding of the Hayden Planetarium so
that we would share this with the world
the digital universe is the basis of our
space show productions that we do our
main space shows in the dome but what
you see here is a result of actually
internships that we hosted with Lynn
shipping University in Sweden and I’ve
had 12 students work on this for their
graduate work and the result has been
this software called uni view and a
company called schists in sweden this
software allows interactive use and so
this actual flight path and movie that
we see here was actually flown live I
captured this live from my laptop in a
cafe called Earth matters on the lower
east side of Manhattan where I live and
it was done as a collaborative project
with the Rubin Museum of Himalayan art
for a exhibit on comparative cosmology
and so as we move out we see
continuously from our planet all the way
out into the realm of galaxies as we see
here light travel time giving you a
sense of how far away we are as we move
out the light from these distant
galaxies have taken so long we’re
essentially backing up into the path
we back so far up we’re finally seeing a
containment around us the afterglow of
the Big Bang this is the w map microwave
background that we see will fly outside
it here just to see the sort of
containment if we were outside this it
would almost be meaningless in the
census before time but this is our
containment of the visible universe we
know the universe is bigger not which we
can see coming back quickly we see here
the radio sphere that we jumped out of
in the beginning but these are positions
latest positions of exoplanets that
we’ve mapped and our Sun here obviously
with our own solar system but you’re
going to see we’re going to have to jump
in here pretty quickly between several
orders of magnitude to get down to where
we see the solar system these are the
paths Voyager 1 Voyager 2 Pioneer 11 and
pioneer 10 the first four spacecraft to
have left the solar system coming in
closer
picking up Earth orbit of the moon and
we see the earth
this map can be updated and we can add
in new data I know dr. Carolyn Porco is
the camera pie for the Cassini mission
but here we see the complex trajectory
of the Cassini mission color-coded four
different mission phases ingeniously
developed so that 45 encounters with the
largest moon Titan which is larger than
the planet Mercury diverts the orbit
into different parts of mission phase
the software allows us to come close and
look at parts of this the software can
also be networked between domes we have
a growing user base of this when we
network domes and we can network between
domes and classrooms we’re actually
sharing tours of the universe with the
first sub saharan planetarium in Ghana
as well as new libraries that have been
built in the ghettos in Columbia and a
high school in Cambodia and the
Cambodians have actually controlled the
Hayden Planetarium from their high
school this is an image from Saturday
photographed by the Aqua satellite but
through the univ ii software and so
you’re seeing the edge of the earth this
is Nepal this is in fact right here is
the valley of Lhasa right here in Tibet
but we can see the haze from fires and
so forth in the Ganges Valley down below
in India this is Nepal and Tibet and
just in closing it’s like to say this
beautiful world that we live on here we
see a bit of the snow that some of you
may have had to brave and coming out so
I’d like to just say that what the world
needs now is a sense of being able to
look at ourselves in this much larger
condition now and a much larger sense of
what home is because our home is the
universe and we are the universe
essentially we carry that in us and to
be able to see our context in this
larger sense at all scales helps us all
I think in understanding where we are
and who we
are in the universe thank you
you