Get Started with WWT 2022: For Image Creators
If you make your own astronomical images — whether taken directly from your own telescope, or by processing others data — WWT 2022 offers some cool new tools for sharing your images online. This page walks you through:
Install the Data Processing Tools
The WWT data processing tools are mainly provided as Python software that you can use from the command line.
The first tool to install is Toasty, WWT’s main image processing tool. You can install it using either the pip tool or conda (or also mamba) if you activate the conda-forge package channel. If you’re unsure, we recommend conda and conda-forge. Learn more about conda-forge here.
To install Toasty with pip, run the following in your terminal:
pip install toasty
To install it with conda, run:
conda install toasty
You might also wish to install the WWT Aligner, a more specialized tool. You can use the WWT Aligner to compute the sky coordinates of a bitmap image (TIFF, JPEG, etc.) by aligning it with a one or more scientific images (FITS) that were used to create it. The coordinates are exported as AVM tags, which can be interpreted by Toasty in its toasty tile-study command.
In many cases, the amazing Astrometry.Net service will be able to align your image without needing a reference FITS file. But for some images, especially those with very small fields of view, the WWT Aligner can succeed when Astrometry.Net fails. If you might need this functionality, check out the WWT Aligner installation instructions.
Try Processing Some Images
Once you have the software, you’re ready to get your data into WWT! Images need to be specially processed for display in WWT so that they can be explored interactively over the internet — this processing is what makes it possible for WWT users to visualize a gigapixel-scale image without having to download, well, a gigabyte of data.
Toasty will help you do this processing primarily through the toasty tile-study command, which will transform a single input image. The supporting command wwtdatatool preview will then help you preview the results to check the alignment and appearance.
Next Steps
Once you’ve processed an image, you can share it online by uploading the “tiled” data produced by Toasty and creating a link to it using the WWT Embed Creator tool.
The WWT team is hoping to build some web services that make it even easier to upload and share your images — stay tuned!
Getting Help
If you run into any issues, we recommend seeking support on the WWT user forum, or asking through one of the social media channels listed on the Connect page.