WWT Newsletter: October 2021
Hello WWT community!
October has been quite the busy month — here are our latest updates about 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:
- International Observe the Moon Night
- New Toasty upgrades for extra large imagery ingest
- EXTENSION! Abstract submissions invited for WWT at AAS239! (new deadline today!)
- WWT 2022 Edition
- New Members of the WWT Steering Committee
Best, Peter K. G. Williams, Director of the AAS WorldWide Telescope Project
International Observe the Moon Night
International Observe the Moon Night, an event that challenges individuals to set aside a moment to intentionally look up at our closest celestial neighbor, was October 16th this year. To celebrate, WWT developer Jon Carifio and astrovizicist David Weigel created a lunar interactive that you can use to explore features on the moon’s surface in greater detail than you’d get with the naked eye — or even a powerful telescope! Change between different datasets and pan/zoom to get a closer look. Pick your favorite two, find a location of interest and use the circling arrows (top left corner) to swap between the two layers. Datasets include:
- “Moon” — WWT lunar default: Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Wide Angle Camera Global Mosaic
- CGI Moon Kit - created by the NASA Science Visualization Studio (SVS) at Goddard Space Flight Center
- SELENE Kaguya TC Ortho Global Mosaic - high-resolution (7.4 meters per pixel!) imagery from JAXA
- Moon LRO LOLA Color Shaded Relief 388m v4 — a colorized elevation map
- Unified Geologic Map of the Moon
The interactive was used in promotion for a lunar tour premiered by our friends at the U.S. Space & Rocket Center.
Our thanks to the mission teams, NASA SVS, and USGS for making these great datasets publicly available! We hope that WWT’s technology helps you appreciate them in a whole new way.
New Toasty upgrades for extra large imagery ingest
In order to visualize the SELENE Kaguya lunar imagery, we needed to write new code in order to handle enormous images in the JPG2000 file format. At 1,474,593 by 737,297 pixels, which provides a beautifully crisp ~7.4 m/px resolution globally, the 160-gigabyte image needs to be broken into more manageable pieces during processing, which the latest version of toasty can now do. Even with the toasty improvements, the code still took around 24 hours to fully process the data on Harvard’s Cannon compute cluster! You can explore the fruit of our efforts in the lunar interactive.
EXTENSION! Abstract submissions invited for WWT at AAS239! (New deadline today)
If you are the kind of person who might attend the AAS239 conference in Salt Lake City in January 2022, you — yes, you — are invited to submit an abstract to present at a special session on all things WWT! See this page on the WWT Contributor Hub for more information. Submissions don’t count against the usual limit of one abstract per person per meeting! Deadline today — October 29th. If you’ve already submitted an abstract for this, we can’t wait to see it, and you, in Salt Lake City.
WWT 2022 Edition
Each newsletter mentions new this-and-that and it can be confusing (even for us) to keep track of the status of the whole WWT ecosystem of software. Thus, we’d like to tease the release of WWT 2022 Edition: the latest milestone of the WWT team’s efforts to develop a suite of astronomy visualization tools that run on devices ranging from your phone to high-end planetariums. Launching to a universe near you at AAS239!
New Members of the WWT Steering Committee
The WWT project welcomes two new members to its steering committee:
- Dr. Robert Nikutta of NSF’s NOIRLab, project scientist for Astro Data Lab
- Dr. Catherine Zucker, a Hubble Fellow at the Space Telescope Science Institute
The project also thanks Andy Connolly for his service as he rotates off of the committee.
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.