Night Sky Astronomy Panels for OpenSpace from the Elumenati and Tau Immersive are available here!
Night sky astronomy tours are probably the foundational planetarium show. After industrialization and urbanization hid the stars from so many in the early 20th century, this is what made the first planetarium projector the “Miracle of Jena”–it created the opportunity to reconnect city dwellers with the night sky that had become hidden behind the glare of urban light pollution.
A shot of a younger me, moments before presenting a dome show.
For the first ten years of my career a night sky tour, which we called Under Starlit Skies at the Chaffee Planetarium, was a highlight of my week, where every Sunday afternoon (and daily during the summer) I toured audiences through the current constellations, planets, and more. These shows can meet a variety of needs for our guests. For some, it’s practical tips for trips they intend to take to visit dark skies. For others, it’s an opportunity to enjoy a sky they rarely (or never) experience. I see it as an opportunity for everyone to learn and reconnect with humanity’s long relationship with the sky.
Delivering these shows, planetarians inhabit a role between tour guide and storyteller, and I think it’s important that technology never stands in the way of our performance. We need to be empowered to smoothly deliver the story we want to tell, and this is where I’ve been interested in using OpenSpace’s new ShowComposer feature to bring together the core elements one needs to deliver a sky tour into easy-to-use control panel pages.
I’m grateful the folks at the Elumenati felt the same way. With OpenSpace forming a core application in their installations, they wanted to empower their users to get the most out of this software and really embrace OpenSpace as part of the WorldViewer software suite.
In partnership, Elumenati and Tau Immersive have developed an easy-to-use but highly flexible night sky program for OpenSpace. This will be included in the next release of Elumenati’s WorldViewer software for all of their customers, but in the open source spirit of the OpenSpace project, is also available to anyone using OpenSpace, for free, right here! Check the readme.pdf inside the user.zip file for complete install instructions.
Our goal with this program is to make it simple for anyone to sit down with OpenSpace and give a compelling tour of the sky, with the common controls all in one easy-to-use panel. Behind-the-scenes, this meant rebuilding some core assets and programming new shortcuts and actions for OpenSpace. For you the user, it means you have a foundation for your own programs with complex scripts turned into simple one-press buttons, and key assets concentrated right where you need them. And if you need to make a change, OpenSpace’s ShowComposer provides an easy framework to customize the show to your needs while these buttons provide a rich template of examples.
It was a pleasure to support Elumenati’s vision for an easy-to-use planetarium presentation experience with my robust background as both a presenter of shows, and as a program developer who has supported scores of planetarians in telling their stories through technology.
Please reach out to us if we can do anything to help you improve your presentation experience with OpenSpace!
Dan and colleagues using an Elumenati Geodome at the USS Hornet Sea, Air and Space Museum.
