A 3D atlas of the universe - Carter Emmart

[Music] [Applause] It's a great honor, uh, today to share with you um the Digital Universe, which was created for humanity to really see uh where we are in the universe.

Um, 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 bend back on itself that we could understand our planet as a limited condition.

The Digital Universe Atlas um has been um built at the American Museum of Natural History um over the past 12 years, and we maintained 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 um the Earth uh in proper registration against the universe.

As we see, NASA supported this work 12 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 uh Lin shipping University in Sweden.

I've had 12 students work on this for their graduate work and um the result has been uh this software called Uniview and a company called Skiss in Sweden. This software allows interactive uh use and um 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 um where I live and um it was done as a collaborative project with the Ruben Museum of Himalayan art um for an exhibit on comparative cosmology.

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 gives you a sense of how far away we are. As we move out, the light from these distant galaxies has taken so long, we're essentially backing up into the past.

We back so far up, we're finally seeing a containment around us, the afterglow of the Big Bang. This is the W map um microwave background that we see. We'll fly outside it here just to see this sort of containment. If we were outside this, it would almost be meaningless in the sense of before time, but this is our containment of the visible universe.

We know the universe is bigger than that which we can see. Coming back quickly, we see here the radiosphere that we jumped out of in the beginning, but these are positions uh 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 of Voyager 1, Voyager 2, Pioneer 11, and Pioneer 10, the first four spacecraft to have left the solar system.

Coming in closer, picking up the 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 Pi for the Cassini Mission, but here we see the complex trajectory of the Cassini mission color-coded for different mission phases, ingeniously developed so that 45 encounters with the largest moon Titan, which is larger than the planet Mercury, divert the orbit into different parts of the mission phase.

This 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, and we network domes, and we can network between domes and classrooms.

We're actually sharing uh tours of the universe with the first subsaharan planetarium in Ghana, as well as um new libraries that have been built in the GTOs in Colombia and a high school um in Cambodia. 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 Uniview software. And so you're seeing the edge of the Earth. This is Nepal. This is uh, in fact, right here is a valley of Lassa right here in Tibet. But we can see the haze um from fires and so forth in the Ganges Valley down below in India.

This is Nepal and Tibet. And just in closing, I’d like to say this beautiful world that we live on um here we see a bit of the snow that some of you may have had to brave in 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.

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.