The starship on West 81st Street and Central Park West is losing its captain.
For nearly three decades, Carter Emmart, 64, has been director of astro-visualization at the American Museum of Natural History’s Hayden Planetarium, curating the ultimate diorama: a digital universe of data and images culled from space probes and telescopes the world over. Mr. Emmart and his crew have created a series of mesmerizing planetarium shows over the years that take audiences forward and backward in time and space to understand the origin and potential fate of the cosmos.
With shoulder-length hair, beads, bracelets and a propensity to show up for big events in a blue astronaut jumpsuit, Mr. Emmart himself seems to have been beamed in from somewhere Out There. His Manhattan office is festooned with a collection of Barbies, dolls he has used in design models, which he has lugged to all corners of the world, having dressed them in regional costumes.
To date, millions of planetarium visitors have watched and heard stars explode; galaxies collide; clouds of interstellar space dust glow, swirl and melt. They have zoomed over alien landscapes and pierced the mysterious dark matter that permeates space. The shows have been narrated by celebrities such as Tom Hanks, Robert Redford, Whoopi Goldberg and the museum’s own impresario of the sky, Neil deGrasse Tyson. The shows have been distributed to 60 different institutions in 40 countries.
A very lucky viewer could lie on the floor of the planetarium on a recent slow afternoon as Mr. Emmart led a personal tour of his digital universe, pausing to appreciate craters on the moon and the dunes of Mars.
Mr. Emmart’s final show, “Encounters in the Milky Way,” which opened on June 9, traces the history and future of our own galaxy. At the end of the summer, Mr. Emmart plans to retire to Thailand. “I’m looking forward to being in nature with the peace and quiet,” he said recently.
His passengers have included the famous, the anonymous, astronauts and aspirants. In 2000, Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the moon, flew the entire board of the Cincinnati Museum of Natural History to New York to watch a show. He and Mr. Emmart ended up in the planetarium dome together, giggling over its superior computing power compared with that of the Apollo flights.
Many of Mr. Emmart’s viewers are children. Born and raised in New Jersey, he spent his own youth taking classes at the museum’s old, revered Hayden Planetarium. (It was thoroughly refurbished in 2000.) “I grew up here loving the place,” he said.
While still in high school, Mr. Emmart won a nationwide contest to design a photometer for his telescope, to measure the brightness of astronomical objects. The prize was an invitation to a conference at Caltech in Pasadena, but he was disinvited when they discovered that he was not yet 18. He went anyway, using his savings from delivering newspapers, and wound up having lunch with Clyde Tombaugh, the discoverer of Pluto.
The conference was his first introduction to the wider world of space artists and visionaries. He followed some of them to the University of Colorado Boulder, where he studied geophysics and, in 1981, helped organize a series of conferences called “The Case for Mars,” which ran until 1996.
Mr. Emmart’s father was a commercial artist; storyboards came naturally to him. “That’s how I ended up drawing,” he said. “It was a family tradition.” He wanted to envisage the rockets and concepts that people like Buzz Aldrin, the second man to walk on the moon, were dreaming up for future space missions. “Could we use space shuttle parts and put that all together?” he said.
By day he made architectural models for a construction firm; Barbies were useful for illustrating scale. Twice in 1989 he was flown to Russia with the International Association of Astronomical Artists. It was there that he became friends with Dennis Davidson, who had beaten him out for a job at the Hayden Planetarium a couple of years earlier.
In 1991 he took a job at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif., to help on a book project about Mars. Two years later he shifted to the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo. As that role was ending, he asked Mr. Davidson if there were any openings at the planetarium. There were.
“So I came out here on Valentine’s Day, 1998, and I was working here by June,” Mr. Emmart said.
At the time, the museum was engaged in a major renovation project that involved tearing down the venerable Hayden Planetarium and replacing it with a big globe inside a glass cube: the Rose Center for Earth and Space. Many New Yorkers were outraged, including Mr. Emmart, who had written two letters in support of a lawsuit against the project.
For the new Rose Center, Mr. Davidson had the idea to create an electronic atlas, called the Digital Galaxy, and the tools to visualize and simulate flying through it. Mr. Emmart would be the director of what he now understood would be a planetarium experience far superior to the old one.
“This was an opportunity of a lifetime, really,” he said. Early on, there were many shopping trips to Silicon Valley. One popular stop was Silicon Graphics in Mountain View, Calif., where for $5 million they bought an SGI Onyx2 Reality Monster supercomputer — to go with a Zeiss Mark IX star projector.
“The investment in that machine is what got us over the hump to do the kind of productions that we continue to do today,” Mr. Emmart said.
The planetarium uses two Nvidia Quadro RTX computers to generate images and sound, which are beamed onto the inside of the dome by a matrix of laser projectors and two dozen speakers around the base of the dome. The Mark IX rests out of sight under the floor. “My virtual-reality headset has 400 seats,” Mr. Emmart said.
To navigate this cosmic diorama back and forth through time and space, Mr. Emmart and his crew drew on a program called Partiview — short for particle view — developed by Stuart Levy, a programmer at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. Mr. Emmart had been chatting with Mr. Levy at a meeting in New Orleans and asked him about some star clusters. Mr. Levy opened his IBM ThinkPad to show him a dynamic portrayal.
Mr. Emmart was surprised: Didn’t you need a supercomputer to run this? No, Mr. Levy said — it worked on Windows. The implication, Mr. Emmart realized, was that “we could share the digital universe with the world.”
This became his mission. Invited by the science fiction author and technological prophet Arthur C. Clarke to show his art in Colombo, the capital of Sri Lanka, Mr. Emmart spent three days in 2002 flying him through the digital universe. “The universe feels slightly too ostentatious,” Mr. Clarke remarked with a sheepish grin.
Partiview evolved into Uniview and then OpenSpace, an open-source software platform, developed with help from NASA, for visualizing the universe. In 2013, the Lower East Side Girls Club of New York created a planetarium show that Dr. Emmart operated from his laptop at a bar in Bangkok. “It had the best internet connection, much better than the hotel or internet cafes.”
Mr. Emmart’s final Hayden Planetarium space show was narrated by the actor Pedro Pascal. It starts nearly a million miles from Earth, where Gaia, a European space telescope, has charted the locations and movements of two billion stars.
Farther out we encounter the Oort cloud, a spherical shell of ice fragments left over from the formation of the solar system four billion years ago. It extends 10 trillion miles from the sun — almost halfway to the next star.
Nobody has ever seen the cloud, which is named for the Dutch astronomer Jan Oort, because it is too distant and faint. Its presence has been deduced by analyzing comets that fall from there into the inner, warmer solar system. The new simulations, however, have revealed in the Oort cloud a new, trillion-mile-long spiral structure shaped by the gravitational field of the Milky Way galaxy.
“It’s almost like a dragon,” Mr. Emmart said. “It’s this wild structure. The galaxy is pulling these little tails out.” Its discovery is the subject of a new paper by David Nesvorny of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder and other astronomers, including Mr. Emmart.
In the show, when Oort clouds are painted in around the other stars (our star isn’t alone in having one), the local neighborhood resembles a bubble bath. A dwarf galaxy dances a fandango with the Milky Way, shredding itself again and again as it passes repeatedly through the bigger galaxy. Stars go supernova, exploding like popcorn. Familiar constellations distort and dissolve as their constituent stars go their separate ways over cosmic time.
At 24 minutes, and 27 years, the show ends way too soon.
His visit with Mr. Clarke, who died in 2008, had an enduring consequence. While discussing one of Mr. Clarke’s books, “The Fountains of Paradise,” he asked if Mr. Emmart had visited Angkor Wat in Cambodia.
Mr. Emmart said he hoped to go someday. Mr. Clarke whacked the table with a big, loud hand. “Someday?” he bellowed with a laugh, urging him: When are you going to get up and go?
So, in 2007, he went for the first of many trips. On one of them he passed through Bangkok, where he met a young woman named Songkran, in whose orbit he has remained ever since.
The couple now plan to marry. He has built a simple cabin, where they will live with four dogs, three water buffalo, two ponds, 12 mango trees and a dome in which he can show off the universe.
“We’ll be pretty self-sufficient,” he said, “And the sky is glorious.” The Southern Cross and Omega Centauri are visible from the house. He has helped teach astronomy at two schools in Siem Reap, in Cambodia, and there are plans for a planetarium there, which would be the nation’s first. “We did build a bamboo and cloth dome that actually worked but needed improvements,” Mr. Emmart said.
One of his students in 2015 was a sixth-grader named Vatey Ouy, who asked a lot of questions, as he recalls. Today she is studying engineering with an emphasis on aerospace at Colorado State University, under a scholarship from the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation.
“While I never had kids, my students are more of a reward than I could ever have imagined,” Mr. Emmart said.
“If I’ve done anything in this life, it’s helping others get Out There, as you say,” he told me, “and to look back and feel in our soul” how small we are but then realize how “far our minds together have spanned.”
Ad Astra, Captain Emmart.
Dennis Overbye is the cosmic affairs correspondent for The Times, covering physics and astronomy.
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