WWT News and Announcements

Do-it-yourself Planetarium

PeterTurcan — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 17:03:02 GMT

This is still a work-in-progress, but as part of a Microsoft Research/schools project we are building a prototype planetarium out of cardboard and particleboard. The "dome" is a geodesic dome built out of triangles of cardboard and strong binder clips. The base of the dome forms a decagon (10-sided figure), but as the dome is titled 20 degrees, the dome support forms an elliptical decagon, and is made out of half inch particleboard to provide a solid base for the dome. The diagram shows the idea.

The reason for the 20 degree tilt is to provide a much better experience for the students when traveling through space - a vertical projection will give the impression that the planet or star is "falling" onto the viewers, whereas a view forward will give the impression of traveling to that planet or star. It is also simply more comfortable to look forward than to look up.

The projector and mirror are placed on a table to the right of the door in the image above.

Plans for building this planetarium (assuming of course it works!) will be posted shortly.

WWT Equinox Beta out today!

dinos — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 17:42:43 GMT

Today, the WorldWide Telescope gets an update ... a major update, as shown by this screenshot:

That's right - WWT has gone 3D . You can fly through the Solar System now, or zoom out further to see our place in the Milky Way, and the Milky Way's place as one of half a million galaxies found by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey.

We have also added several other new features, including the following:

* Tour animation - text and inserted images can expand, contract, move, spin, fade, etc within a slide.

* WWT can now be localized to your language of choice. (And you can help with the localization efforts.) To begin with, we've added a second language - Simplified Chinese.

* More data:

* Hundreds of new images from the Hubble, Chandra, Spitzer space telescopes

* A new Astrophotography section, with images from renowned astrophotographer Jack Newton.

* New surveys : GALEX in the ultraviolet band, Fermi in the gamma-ray band, as well as sixteen surveys about the Cosmic Microwave Background from the WMAP Science Team's Five Year release.

* Fifty new panoramas of Mars and the Moon, from the Phoenix, Spirit, Opportunity, Pathfinder, and Apollo missions. Some are red-blue anaglyphs, so get your 3d glasses out!

Those are the primary features, but there are several others:

* cone searching with NED (NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database) returning results as VOTables

* pressing F11 to enter and leave a full-screen mode

* saving to Desktop wallpaper

* changing planet sizes between Actual and Visible

* using a Xbox Controller or 3d Connexion Navigator

* going to locations defined using coordinate systems other than J2000

* textures on Saturnian and Uranian moons

* Earth globes where you can see polar regions

* panoramas of telescopes at Mauna Kea

Upcoming (in the next month)

* Utilities for you to get your own data and images into WorldWide Telescope format, and to produce WTML files - the XML format that WWT uses.

* The long awaited details on how to set up your own WWT Communities.

For more details and screenshots, see the WWT Data Blog.

To try it out, head over to the heavily revamped WorldWide Telescope website.

And please send your comments, positive and negative, to wwtpage@microsoft.com .

And keep checking the forums !

If you're in the press or a blogger, you might find these useful:

Hotfix Available

Chuck Needham — Sat, 17 May 2008 02:20:29 GMT

Hotfix Overview

This hotfix fixes Install issues, allows proxy configuration, and solves “install for everyone” issues on Microsoft Vista.

Download

There are two methods to install this hotfix.

1. Download and run this Hotfix: http://content.worldwidetelescope.org/update/wwtsetup.msi

2. In WorldWide Telescope click the down arrow under Settings and click “Check for Updates”