WWT Newsletter: August 2021
Hello WWT community!
We hope the end of summer is treating you well. Here is what’s going on in the world of AAS WorldWide Telescope! As usual, if you’ve got any of your own news to share, let the team know on social media or by emailing wwt@aas.org.
In this update:
- HiPS Catalogues in JupyterLab
- WWT Events: SEPA Recap
- More new NOIRLab Images in WWT
- New Features in Toasty Pipeline Software
Best, Peter K. G. Williams, Director of the AAS WorldWide Telescope Project
HiPS Catalogues in JupyterLab
The WWT development team continues to progress the functionality of HiPS Catalogues in JupyterLab — the latest sneak peak is on YouTube! You can now navigate huge (billion-row) catalogs on the sky, then pull the data into Python using the pywwt library. There’s a bit more work to be done to polish up the functionality (like writing documentation 😅), but we hope you’ll agree that the video is super cool!
WWT Events: SEPA Recap — Creating Web Interactives Using AAS WorldWIde Telescope (July 30)
The WWT workshop at the the Southeastern Planetarium Association Conference was a resounding hit with the ~50 participants. David Weigel, of the U.S. Space & Rocket Center INTUITIVE Planetarium, demonstrated how to create custom web interactives allowing individuals to continue their planetarium experience virtually using WWT. Since the workshop took place on July 30th (the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 15 landing), one of the sample interactives was a tour of the Apollo 15 Stop 9A during the third day’s EVA. Press the spacebar while the tour is playing to pause playback and explore on your own.
More new images for the NOIRLab collection
Recent efforts from NOIRLab to add WCS metadata to older images has provided us the opportunity to process many more images to add to the NOIRLab collection, which brings our total to over 375! Our favorite of the current new batch is the Elephant Trunk Nebula (IC 1396A).
Stay tuned for more images from NOIRLab to be added to WWT as we have ~150 still in the pipeline ready for alignment. And speaking of pipelines …
Toasty Pipeline Software — New Features
Toasty is a software tool that allows users to process astro imagery into the “tile pyramids” that enable quick and easy viewing in WWT. You can use it to process single images, and it also has a “pipeline” mode for handling image collections like NOIRLab’s. WWT’s development team has released a new version of toasty, the 0.7 series, with some useful improvements in the pipeline functions. Images can now be permanently ignored — useful when the image library includes images of the actual observatories as well as the astronomical images themselves! Learn more about toasty and reach out to us if you would like help processing your data or if you have any desired enhancements. Toasty can be built from the source code on GitHub or installed as a conda-forge package.
Stay in Touch!
We always love to hear from WWT users and enthusiasts. Follow our social media accounts, email wwt@aas.org, or post on the WWT forum.