OpenSpace Tutorials
Interested in learning how to use OpenSpace? In addition to the resources below, the OpenSpace team and community of users also occasionally offer live workshops — check our Events page for upcoming opportunities.
Wiki tutorials
Visit the OpenSpace Wiki for tutorials to help you get started in OpenSpace. Currently available are user tutorials focused on:
Download, Install, and Run
Navigation - Controlling the Camera
Navigation - Focus
Time in OpenSpace
Using the Menus - Time
Using the Menus - Datasets
Using the Menus - GlobeBrowsing
Introduction to OpenSpace (May & October 2020)
Dan Tell of the California Academy of Sciences gives an introduction to OpenSpace for Dome Dialogues e-Conference #11, recorded May 6, 2020.
Dan Tell continues his introduction to OpenSpace with this workshop from the Great Lakes Planetarium Association annual meeting, October 12-16, 2020.
Explore the universe with OpenSpace & OpenSpace 101 (june 2020)
In June 2020, the OpenSpace team presented two introductory webinars for NASA JPL’s Museum Alliance and NASA Solar System Ambassadors. Members of these groups can view the June 4 recording here and the June 18 recording here. (Are you an informal science educator? Your institution may already be a member of the Museum Alliance!)
OpenSpace Tutorials (2018)
These tutorial videos were created to help new users familiarize themselves with OpenSpace and experienced users gain a deeper understanding of some of the datasets included in the software. All these videos were made using OpenSpace version 0.11 Beta, released on January 1, 2018, so some of the buttons and menus do not correspond with more recent versions. These videos are led by Carter Emmart, Director of Astrovisualization at the American Museum of Natural History.
This video shows how to load OpenSpace, display menus (F2: basic, F3: advanced) , and conduct basic interaction using mouse navigation. Of note is how OpenSpace loads with Earth as the default center of interest. The basics of time control are also covered.
Here we show the default image of Earth, which (assuming you are connected to the Internet) is the latest available global mosaic available from NASA's Global Imagery Browse Service (GIBS). This means that for today's image, we show yesterday's full global mosaic.
Moving off the default target of Earth, we show how to select the Moon as our focus and navigate toward it. We show how to access its surface map layer and adjust its attributes. Adjustments to "gamma" and "multiplier" settings can effectively alter display settings for particular displays, and are quite useful.
The selection of Earth layers from menu and by time are covered in this video. We start with introducing the choice of layers for the night side of Earth, where we change the default "Earth at Night 2012," to daily "Temporal Earth at Night" coverage served from NASA's Global Imagery Browse Service (GIBS).
Here we feature the galaxy surveys available in OpenSpace from the American Museum of Natural History's Digital Universe Atlas. We start out at Earth and move away from it while remaining centered on it to gain an ever widening perspective, from planet within the solar system to a location orbiting half way out from the center of the Milky Way Galaxy.
Our idea of "home" is expanded here, from Earth in orbit as just another planet within the solar system, to that of just one member of the vast Milky Way Galaxy.
