This space artist changed the way we see the universe

LOS ANGELES -- 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.

The piece is a metallic album cover affixed to the surface of the Voyager 1 spacecraft. Inside is the Golden Record, a calling card from humanity designed to introduce alien beings to the sounds and images of Earth. Lomberg’s pictorial instructions for playing the record are engraved on the cover, which travels another 912,000 miles away from us every day.

Erosion in space occurs slowly, so the pictures should be readable for at least the next billion years. Long after the last Homo sapiens has perished, Lomberg’s drawings may provide the universe’s most compelling clue that our colorful, complicated species was ever here.

For the last half-century, Lomberg has been at the center of efforts to help inhabitants of this humble planet understand their place in the universe. The process has taken him on a journey as well, one that can’t compare to Voyager in distance but that has revealed truths no less sublime than the images the craft has captured.

Let’s retrace Voyager 1’s path from Earth. Pass the orbit of Saturn, where its trajectory diverged from that of Voyager 2 and its identical copy of the Golden Record. Cross the orbit of 6446 Lomberg, the asteroid named in