Traveling the Cosmos With Carter Emmart, One Last Time

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.