As I watched this, I realized that as we celebrate the arrival of a new year, we are still very much a solar society, organizing our lives around the movement of one solitary planet around one solitary star--and that our society is not that much different than it was thousands of years ago. It is also comforting to think that time is not going fast at all, as technology leads us to believe.
The Known Universe takes viewers from the Himalayas through our atmosphere and the inky black of space to the afterglow of the Big Bang. Every star, planet, and quasar seen in the film is possible because of the world's most complete four-dimensional map of the universe, the Digital Universe Atlas that is maintained and updated by astrophysicists at the American Museum of Natural History. The new film, created by the Museum, is part of an exhibition, Visions of the Cosmos: From the Milky Ocean to an Evolving Universe, at the Rubin Museum of Art in Manhattan through May 2010.
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