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 Himalayas.]
(Music)
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 had seen the horizon
bend 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 12 years.
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
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 the result of, actually, internships
that we hosted with Linkoping University
in Sweden.
I've had 12 students work on this
for their graduate work,
and the result has been this software called Uniview
and a company called SCISS in Sweden.
This software
allows interactive use,
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 an 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 past.
We back so far up
we're finally seeing a containment around us --
the afterglow of the Big Bang.
This is the WMAP
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 as before time.
But this 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 radio sphere that we jumped out of in the beginning,
but these are positions,
the latest positions of exoplanets
that we've mapped,
and our sun here, obviously, with our own solar system.
What 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 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 P.I.
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 that the planet Mercury,
diverts the orbit into different parts of mission phase.
This software allows us to come close
and look at parts of this.
This 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 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 Uniview software.
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,
I'd just 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 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.
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.
(Applause)