LOS ANGELES — Artist Jon Lomberg’s work has provided us with a deeper understanding of our galaxy with his most accurate painting of the Milky Way ever created. Lomberg’s work on the docuseries, “The Cosmos” earned him an Emmy, and an asteroid is named in his honor for his contributions to science.

Lomberg joined Lisa McRee on “LA Times Today.”

Lomberg was hired by the Air and Space Museum of the Smithsonian to create a mural showing what the Milky Way galaxy looks like. He explained how he created the image we are so familiar with. 

“Because we’re in the disk of our galaxy, we have what I call the ‘anchovy’s eye view’ of the pizza. So the pizza doesn’t look like a big circle. It’s just kind of a horizon all around him. And that’s the Milky Way we see. So what I had to do is work with some of the scientists at the Smithsonian to map out the way we think the spiral arms of our galaxy are shaped and locate a lot of actual objects in that and then take a year to paint it,” he explained. 

Lomberg also contributed to a Golden Record, a metal LP that was sent to space on the Voyager aircraft in 1977. He discussed what was included on the record and why NASA sent it out into space. 

“The Golden Record uses pictures, sound and music to paint a portrait of Earth, or at least Earth, as it was in 1977, to try to show extraterrestrials what we were like... We even included a needle with the record in the box, and all you have to do is put the needle on the record and spin it and the sound automatically comes out. Decoding the pictures is a little bit harder, but we think anybody who’s in a spacecraft... will be motivated enough to spend enough time on it and consult enough other brains to decode. We think that for somebody as advanced as we think they are, it really won’t be too hard,” Lomberg said. 

Included on the record are images of Earth, sounds of daily life and nature, and voices saying hello in 64 different languages. As the record is now 14.8 billion miles away from Earth, Lomberg weighed in on if anyone will ever find it. 

“The odds against the record being found are pretty huge. It’s really a note in a bottle thrown into the ocean. But sometimes those bottles get found, so you never know. But even if it’s not found, for me, the fact that some of our are some of our best music, some images of the most beautiful things on Earth will survive, will be out there for literally billions of years, almost as a memorial to ourselves that will outlast us. It’s an equally comforting thought,” he said.

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