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Foreground Studies So there you are, happily making a tour and want to fade in a picture of some study. You get your camera all aligned, and then click on the thumbnail of the study. And then WWT promptly moves to a new position so that you can see the study as a whole, but losing your old camera position! What you should do instead is click on the 'image' inset of the thumbnail. That's the bit circled in orange below. That sets the study image to be a foreground image but doesn't
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As you may or may not know, NASA's SkyView service (led by Tom McGlynn) has been extremely helpful to getting WWT running, providing data for over half our surveys. They've put out a heat map showing the most frequently accessed regions of the sky since mid 2007. You can read about it in this Physorg article and view the heat map in the WWT Experimental Community . Here are a couple of screenshots crossfaded between the green heat map and the DSS. In the first shot, you can see the plane
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We have put out a couple of tools for people to convert their own data to WWT format. You can process pictures of individual objects in the sky using WWT StudyChopper , and low and medium resolution panoramas, planetary textures, and sky surveys using WWT SphereToaster . You will still have to put the files created on the internet yourself, but once you do that, they will be accessible using WTML files to other WWT users. The tools can be found from the MSR Downloads page here . They are both installed
Posted to
WWT Data Blog
(Weblog)
by
dinos
on
02-05-2009
Filed under: WWT, WorldWide Telescope, Academic Development Kit, data, Tools, WWT-ADK
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Those using WWT today may notice some new datasets in there. Preliminary versions of these datasets have been in the WWT Data and Experimental communities for the past month. You can find them under All-Sky Surveys. The DSS Smoothed dataset is a initial attempt to eliminate the seams in the Digitized Sky Survey background. You can find more details about it here . There’s an interesting story here, but we aren’t allowed to tell it … yet. The GALEX Ultraviolet datasets have been upgraded with their
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During the recent 213th meeting of the American Astronomical Society, WWT unleashed a new update. The new features in the Solstice Release, detailed quite nicely in a post on Virtual Earth, An Evangelist's Blog , include stereo 3d – with both red-cyan anaglyph and a side-by-side mode that works very nicely on GeoWalls. If you haven’t heard of a GeoWall, here’s a quick explanation, from personal experience in my COSMUS days. A GeoWall is probably the cheapest way of displaying 3d visuals in stereo
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Suppose you have a photograph of a small part of the sky, and you want to see it in WWT and share it with friends. Here’s how you can do so. We assume that the image (and, if you wish, a thumbnail) is already internet-accessible. All you need to do is use the url below, with a few parameters. This is from information provided by Jonathan Fay , the architect/developer of WWT. Base URL: http://www.worldwidetelescope.org/wwtweb/ShowImage.aspx? URL Parameters: You require the following parameters. All
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Communities are the primary way in which WWT users can share data and tours with each other. They are made by external individuals or organizations, such as planetariums, science centres, astronomy clubs, magazines, blogs, schools, classes, and class projects. Anyone can create multiple communities. You can set up your own community using your own servers (we do not yet offer specific storage for this purpose) and have it working using WWT without ever telling us at Microsoft Research about
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WTML stands for Worldwide Telescope Markup Language. It is one of three file formats native to WWT, the others being WTT files to store tours and WWTFIG to store constellation figures. If you want to host any such files on your servers, you will need to add them to the list of mime types supported by the servers. The entries for those are : File Extension Mime Type WWT Collections (and Communities) .wtml application/x-wtml WWT Tours .wtt application/x-wtt WWT Constellation Figures .wwtfig
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W always have more data in the works that has yet to make it to the main WWT datasets. If you would like to have a look at them, join these two communities. To join the WWT Data Community, click here ! The datasets in here are as reliable as other datasets in WWT - you can use them in tours without fear that their storage location will change in the near future. The initial datasets available in the WWT Data Community are the following: A first attempt to smooth out the Digitized Sky Survey using
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Here are, in no particular order, some tips for WWT users. (PS: Anyone seen the new tours that went up this week, for WALL-E , the first pictures of extrasolar planets, and a farewell to the Phoenix Lander?) Q: How can I slow down the way WWT zooms? A1: Press SHIFT while zooming. A2: Set the Zoom Speed in the Settings panel. Q: My mouse is dead / missing / visiting relatives. How do I zoom? A: Use Page Up / Page Down. You can also use + and –. Or an Xbox controller or 3d navigator. Q: Help! I’ve