WWT Newsletter: December 2021

Happy holidays, WWT community!

As we approach the end of 2021, we’d like to recap an exciting and busy year. Software developments by the dozens and troves of new data will culminate in a new release of AAS WorldWide Telescope software suite in the New Year! 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 — and please consider supporting the WWT mission this holiday season.

In this update:

Best, Peter K. G. Williams, Director of the AAS WorldWide Telescope Project

WWT 2022 Edition — Launching January

As we mentioned in October, we often promote the new this-and-that features and it can be confusing (even for us) to keep track of the status of the whole WWT ecosystem of software. We are excited to announce the release of WWT 2022 Edition: the latest milestone of the WWT team’s efforts to provide a suite of astronomy visualization tools that run on devices ranging from your phone to high-end planetariums.

Late breaking: we had planned to launch WWT2022 at the AAS239 winter meeting in Salt Lake City, but with the recent cancellation of the meetings’ in-person component, we’ll have to re-evaluate the schedule to see what makes sense. Watch this space!

“toasty view” — new Toasty update

The latest update to our toasty data processing tool (version 0.14) introduces toasty view, a new command for viewing FITS files from the command line — it will tile one or more datasets and open them in the WWT research app all in one magical tool. Just run:

toasty view myfile.fits

and Toasty will do the rest! Here’s a screenshot where we’ve opened a 750-megabyte FITS file and zoomed in on a spectacular radio galaxy in the ELAIS-N1 Deep Field from the International Low Frequency Array (LOFAR).

ELAIS-N1 screenshot

New HiPS Datasets in WWT

New HiPS datasets have been added to the WWT collection — all of these will now available in the research app and webclient!

  • Gaia EDR3
  • SkyMapper Southern Sky Survey DR1.1
  • Band-merged UnWISE catalog and imagery
  • VISTA Hemispheric Survey catalog DR5
  • TESS Input Catalog v8.0
  • ACT2 DR4 CMB map
  • New planetary/moon maps: Ariel, Callisto, Charon, Dione, Europa, Ganymede, Iapetus, Io, Jupiter, lots of Mars, Mercury, Mimas, ….
  • Hyper-Suprime Cam DR2 deep and wide surveys
  • TESS 2-year mosaic
  • THOR radio continuum survey
  • RACS (Rapid ASKAP Continuum Survey) epoch 1
  • APERTIF DR1 uncalibrated continuum
  • LOFAR LoTSS DR1
  • XMM-Newton PN band 4 (2-4.5 keV) mosaic

As an example, here’s a demo allowing you to explore Ethan Kruse’s TESS mosaic with the TESS Input Catalog overlaid.

As always, the WWT team thanks the many researchers worldwide who go to the extra effort to not only create these datasets, but to share them in a way that allows them to be visualized in freely-available software like WWT!

2021 — Year in Review

What a year 2021 has been for WWT! Some highlights:

  • Jon Carifio was hired as a software developer and has gotten off to a fantastic start, contributing all over the project.
  • WWT can now view arbitrarily large scientific FITS datasets, thanks to work funded by the National Science Foundation (grant #2004840).
  • We designed and built the new WWT “research app”, delivering a unique cloud-based tool for astronomy researchers.
  • The toasty data-preparation software gained a boatload of features, including pipeline functionality allowing for bulk image importation, tiling, and alignment from observatories or organizations such as NOIRLab, ESO, and the soon to launch James Webb Space Telescope.
  • We celebrated International Observe the Moon Night by creating a lunar interactive.
  • The new WWT Aligner tool, whose creation was supported by the Space Telescope Science Institute, helps image creators add sky-coordinate information to their images, making them viewable not just in WWT but in all other kinds of sky-based software as well.

And that’s not even mentioning the data! To keep this newsletter a reasonable length, here’s an inexhaustive list (with links) of the data imported by the WWT team this year. In no particular order (just kidding, our favorites are at the top):

Phew! Looks like we’ve got our work cut out for us in 2022, but with an entire software suite release and plenty of projects and ideas in the pipeline we are gearing up for another great year, so …

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. And if you want to show your support for WWT, please consider a donation to help keep the WWT servers running 24/7!

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.