WWT Newsletter: June 2020

Pluto Pack, New Homepage, and More

Dear friends,

Welcome to the next installment of the AAS WorldWide Telescope newsletter! It has been a long time since the previous one, and the world has changed a great deal in the meantime. I’m sure that I speak on behalf of everyone involved in the WWT project when I say that we hope that this message finds you and yours in good health and strong spirits.

Amidst everything, it has been an exciting time for the WWT project, with a great deal of progress on many fronts! Below you’ll find some of the highlights.

Best,

Peter K. G. Williams Innovation Scientist, American Astronomical Society (AAS) Director of the AAS WorldWide Telescope Project

New Content! June 2020 “Pluto Pack” Released

One of the great things about WWT is that you can import new images and data — including your own data! — any time. Over the coming months, we’re going to make a point of packaging up some fun bundles of new data for you to play with, whether it’s “hot off the presses” astronomical data, great amateur astrophotography, or a new twist on a golden oldie.

This month, David Weigel of the US Space and Rocket Center (Huntsville, AL) has produced a fantastic Pluto Pack with enhanced data from the New Horizons mission.

Check out the Pluto Pack trailer on YouTube!

The Pluto Pack includes:

  • New Enhanced Color maps of Pluto and Charon
  • Colorized Terrain maps of Pluto and Charon showing altimetry
  • Not only imagery, but a 3D model of Arrokoth (2014 MU69), the Kuiper Belt Object that New Horizons flew by (learn more)
  • 3D data giving New Horizons’ trajectory through the Solar System
  • A 3D model of the New Horizons spacecraft
  • A WWTL “layer file” bundling all of this data for easy import into the WWT Windows client
  • A playable Guided Tour trailer showing off all of these great new data sets (requires Windows client)
  • A tutorial showing how you can recreate the tour trailer yourself (requires Windows client)

It’s all available for free right here:

Keep your eyes peeled for the next content pack, and get in touch if there’s a dataset that you’d love to see in WWT!

New WWT User Website

The WWT “user” website — the basic informational pages about AAS WorldWide Telescope — have gotten their first refresh in a long time. We’re proud to present our new look!

Visit the new WWT website

This update was made possible by technical improvements in our web infrastructure that are unlocking a whole bunch of exciting changes to WWT’s web incarnations. Stay tuned!

As with everything we do, the source code to the website is on GitHub if you want to see how it works under the hood or suggest an improvement.

Absolute Reams of Revamped Documentation

When we started rebuilding the WWT website, we were reminded about the enormous amount of documentation hidden away in corners of the old website. We dusted it all off, upgraded the backing technology, and relaunched it all here:

Explore the new hub: docs.worldwidetelescope.org

Some of the text is a bit old, but there’s a gold mine of material in there, and more to come! Everything is written in Markdown and hosted on GitHub, which are the main frameworks used for technical documentation these days — your contributions are welcome!

WWT Project Awarded National Science Foundation Grant

In some fantastic news for the project, the American Astronomical Society (AAS) was awarded a three-year grant from the US National Science Foundation to support the development of capabilities for exploring the kinds of billion-pixel images that are going to be produced every few minutes by new facilities like the Rubin Observatory (aka LSST). AAS Project Director Peter K. G. Williams wrote about the grant and project plans here.

In order to build this new technology, the AAS will be looking for folks who are excited to create modern systems for web-based astronomical data visualization! Reach out to the director if that could be you.

Sneak Preview: Embed WWT Anywhere on the Web!

Finally, we have a sneak peek at a new project. We wrote above that WWT’s revamped web infrastructure is unlocking some big opportunities. One of these is the possibility of embedding WorldWide Telescope in webpages the same way that you might embed a YouTube video. We’re prototyping not only an embed application, but a new Embed Creator tool to make it easy to generate the HTML code that you need. Take a look:

Sneak peek: embed.worldwidetelescope.org

We don’t have any documentation or tutorials yet, but those will be coming! The development work is happening in the wwt-webgl-engine repository on GitHub.

Copyright 2019-2023 the .NET Foundation. WorldWide Telescope is a fiscally sponsored project of NumFOCUS, a nonprofit dedicated to supporting the open-source scientific computing community.