Additional Activities
Presenter: Alex Bock and Micah Acinapura
OpenSpace is a free, open-source interactive visualisation software for presenting astronomical data across a range of display environments, including laptops, powerwalls, and planetariums. During this session, attendees will be introduced to the software’s interface and core functionality, including navigation controls and exploration of built-in datasets spanning planetary surfaces to distant galaxies. Attendees will leave with a working knowledge of OpenSpace’s fundamentals, laying the groundwork for follow-up sessions on custom data integration.
Presenter: Micah Acinapura
Building on the introductory session, this talk addresses the process of integrating custom datasets into OpenSpace. Micah Acinapura, Senior Integration Engineer, presents examples showing how custom 3D models, point clouds, and other data types can be ingested and visualised within OpenSpace’s 3D atlas of the universe. The session gives attendees the technical grounding needed to start incorporating their own data into the software.
Presenter: Jacquelin Faherty
Bio:
Jackie Faherty is an Associate Curator in the Department of Astrophysics at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH). Her research group, “Brown Dwarfs in New York City (BDNYC),” is at the forefront of low-mass star, brown dwarf, and giant exoplanet characterisation studies. She is also a regular planetarium presenter at the Hayden and a passionate advocate for using visualisation software and hardware for advancing research and reaching the public.
Abstract:
Astrophysics is a gateway subfield for getting the public interested in STEM at large. However, unlike other scientific disciplines, the “fieldwork” for Astronomers is done in unreachable locations. Young star-forming regions, old halo streams, exotic neutron stars and black holes are all unfathomable distances from Earth. Even solar system objects limit our ability to physically explore them, as the Moon is the farthest any human exploration has ever ventured. Astronomers can investigate the wonders of the Universe through telescopes with detectors that capture distant light and allow us to analyse compositions, structures, and more. The most exciting advancements in studying the Universe over the centuries in astronomy have been establishing a distance scale and mapping the cosmos. Distance measurements to stars and Galaxies allow us to create 3-dimensional maps where we can see the context of star formation and evolution. As such, planetariums are truly the “field sites” for astrophysicists, facilitating immersive experiences of state-of-the-art data. Using advanced planetarium software, we can launch from Earth and explore everything from solar system planets to large structures in the Milky Way to the hierarchical structure of the Universe. In this talk, I will take the audience through the experience of being an Astrophysicist who can immerse themselves in their own data within a planetarium dome. I will create a “tour” of field sites for understand star and planet formation in the past, present, and future, using the most up-to-date, advanced datasets collected to date.
Presenter: Lucia Marchetti
Bio:
Dr Lucia Marchetti is a Senior Lecturer in Astronomy at the University of Cape Town and Director of the UCT/IDIA Visualisation Lab. She holds a PhD in Astronomy from the University of Padua, Italy. Her research focuses on multi-wavelength galaxy formation and evolution, strong gravitational lensing and big data visualisation (exploiting both planetaria and VR technology). She is an active member of several international collaborations within Vera Rubin, Euclid, 4MOST and MeerKAT surveys. A dedicated science communicator, she coordinates Soapbox Science South Africa. She is a member of the International Astronomical Union (IAU) Division J – Galaxies and Cosmology Steering Committee, the South African Institute of Physics (SAIP), and the African Astronomical Society (AfAS), where she is co-founder of the African Planetarium Association.
Abstract:
From the planets next door to galaxies billions of light-years away, our picture of the universe is built almost entirely from light we can never touch and increasingly, from datasets too vast and too complex for any human to take in by eye. The next generation of telescopes, like the giant SKA Observatory and the Vera Rubin Observatory, will only widen that gap, capturing the sky in staggering detail. In this talk, Dr Lucia Marchetti will start with a tour of what we currently know about the universe and the extraordinary structures within it, from star-forming clouds to galaxies and the cosmic web that connects them. She will then take you inside the UCT/IDIA Visualisation Lab, which she directs, to show how they’re using digital planetaria and Virtual Reality to turn that data into three-dimensional worlds you can step into and explore. Drawing on recent examples from the scientific literature, she will show how VR, via iDaVIE, is already helping astronomers make sense of complex cosmic structures and how the same tool is opening up new ways of approaching complex data also in other scientific fields.
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