WWT 2022 Release Notes: Data Holdings
WWT 2022 includes a massive increase in the data holdings that constitute the core WWT corpus.
New HiPS Datasets
The most noteworthy change to WWT’s data holdings for WWT 2022 is the addition of hundreds of HiPS surveys and catalogs. For backwards-compatibility reasons, these are indexed in their own folder of “HiPS” or “External” surveys in the Explore menus of the WWT client applications. These datasets are generously made available by our European partners, and due to the nature of the HiPS format they may load somewhat more slowly than datasets from WWT’s servers.
Merged “VAMP” Feeds
For a while now, the WWT web client has included a “Latest Imagery” collection populated with image feeds from WISE, Chandra, Hubble, Spitzer, and ESO made available as part of the VAMP project and AstroPix. While WWT’s update mechanism for these feeds has been inoperative for a few years now, they still contain hundreds of new images that were not straightforwardly accessible in the Windows client. These feeds have now been integrated into data corpus accessible to the Windows client.
New All-Sky Maps
New all-sky maps available in WWT 2022 include Gaia DR2, PanSTARRS1 3pi, and the Deep Star Maps 2020.
New And Updated Observatory Collections
WWT astrovizicist David Weigel has imported hundreds of new images provided by NOIRLab and the European Southern Observatory. These have been merged with the pre-existing NOAO collection and the ESO VAMP feed, respectively.
Smaller collection updates include WISE, SOFIA, LOFAR, and Hubble.
New Planet Maps
David also imported many new planetary maps from recent missions like Cassini and New Horizons, including:
- Mimas
- Enceladus
- Tethys
- Dione
- Rhea
- Titan
- Iapetus
- Phoebe
- Ceres
- Bennu
- THEMIS Infrared Mars map
New Panoramas
David also imported several new Mars panoramas from Perseverance and Curiosity, as well as some previously-unavailable Apollo panoramas and a special image entitled “North Meets South” produced by ESO.
Fixed Spitzer URLs
The URLs associated with images in the Spitzer collection were broken by updates to the Spitzer web presence. These have been fixed to the extent possible.
Cleanups
Some images with bad astrometry have been removed, including several redundant images of the Crab nebula. A variety of pieces of metadata have been fixed up.
New Data Holdings Database
To create the WWT 2022 data update, we organized the existing WWT data holdings into a common database that is now version-controlled on GitHub in a repository named wwt-core-catalogs. The repository comes with a management script that automates the creation and maintenance of the WTML files that define the corpus. This new piece of infrastructure will massively ease future data updates, which we expect to occur much more frequently going forward.