This space artist changed the way we see the universe

Jon Lomberg’s most far-flung work of art is currently more than 14.8 billion miles away, in the cold no-man’s land between the sun and its closest stars. It’s sort of like asking you to draw a detailed picture of your eyes, if mirrors and reflections didn’t exist,” said Ethan Siegel, a theoretical astrophysicist who is working with Lomberg on “Encyclopedia Cosmologica.” Jon Lomberg reviews a print of his painting of the Milky Way for the Smithsonian Institution at his home in Honaunau, Hawaii. The updated version of Jon Lomberg’s classic Milky Way mural, which was originally commissioned by the National Air and Space Museum of the Smithsonian Institution. “If we got a signal from some civilization that was clearly much older than ours, that had had high technology and survived,” he said, “that kind of gives you hope that it can be done.” Lomberg himself doesn’t believe the Golden Records will ever be found — space is simply too big, the Voyagers too small. This is where Lomberg’s own journey has led him: to a place he has always known instinctively, and that his late collaborator Sagan termed “the cosmic perspective.” Jon Lomberg surveys the Galaxy Garden at Paleaku Gardens Peace Sanctuary in Captain Cook, home to the first licensed Galaxy Garden.