Jon Lomberg drew the cover diagram on the Golden Record to guide the extraterrestrials that might find it. On its face are universalized directions on how to play its content. ©Jon Lomberg
Much of Lomberg’s artwork depicts metaphors between the astronomical and the terrestrial. In this piece, “Space Caravel,” he compares the great age of exploration on Earth with the age of space exploration. ©Jon Lomberg
A depiction of the cosmic cycle of life and death. Here, stars are born from a nebula like seeds leaving a dandelion. This painting was the inspiration for the dandelion motif in the COSMOS series— that Sagan’s “spaceship of the imagination” resembled a seed floating through the cosmos. ©Jon Lomberg
When Lomberg painted the nebulae in Starflowers, he began thinking of how stars were similar to flowers, and not only in appearance. Flowers produce seeds to produce more flowers, as stars produce nebulae to produce more stars. This painting sparked the idea for a living garden model of the galaxy. Hibiscus flowers of a similar hue represent the nebulae in the Galaxy Garden. ©Jon Lomberg

“The galaxy is dynamic, a place where new things are appearing and old things are disappearing,” says Lomberg. Here, his Portrait of the Milky Way, commissioned by the National Air and Space Museum, is juxtaposed next to the Galaxy Garden soon after it opened in 2007. ©Jon Lomberg
©Jon Lomberg
The Galaxy Garden is a model of the Milky Way galaxy, represented with living flowers and plats. It is 100 feet long in diameter and each foot corresponds to 1000 light years. It is a “perspective-changing machine,” says Lomberg, and is located at Paleaku Peace Gardens Sanctuary in Kona, Hawaii. (Photo by Heidy and Pierre Lesage). ©Jon Lomberg