Carter Emmart demos a 3D atlas of the universe

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)