Jonbwfc Ok to get it back to regular you need to eject the ore you put in it. That’s either a specific button press or possibly hold triangle - hover over the atlas in your inventory to check. Getting it to display something sensible in the first place isn’t clear and had me foxed for a bit.
So Atlas Spheres are synced to a particular world - i.e. one per world. If you’ve done the ore bit then you are synced. To get it to start mapping you need to get to the central bit of the region you are currently in. Top on the screen there is something like ??? South of BlahBlah. You need to head to ??? so head North! Keep watching the top in case it switches to South East of BlahBlah. Eventually it’ll say something like Region YackettySmacketty discovered across the screen. At this point the atlas will fill in this region on your sphere.
So it’s not quite as immediate as Minecraft maps, which fill in all the time as you move around, but I think it fills in whether you have it in your hand or not, just it happens a region at a time and you need to find the central point of the region for it to register. (Sometimes this requires a swim).
I’ve not worked out how to spin the sphere around to anything but centred on your current position.