Overview

The WWT project can be hard to wrap your head around because it has so many different uses: visualizing data for research, educating students in classrooms, educating the broader public in planetariums and museums, spurring delight in the beauty of our universe, and even creating art. While all of these applications build on a common foundation, the overall system is admittedly sprawling. To try to anchor your understanding of it all, we’ll start by describing the more “tangible” components of WWT.

Key Features of the WWT Experience🔗

The original manifestation of WWT was the WWT Windows client. Originally demo’ed in 2008, the Windows client lets you explore the sky visually in 2D or 3D modes, showing you a scientifically accurate model of the universe that can overlay real astronomical data from the world’s best telescopes.

The original WWT experience was a 2D sky exploration experience similar to (but predating!) Google Maps, with imagery from the Digitized Sky Survey (DSS). The total DSS dataset weighs in at about a terabyte, which was a lot for 2008. Therefore, the WWT Windows application was — and still is — intimately linked with web services capable of streaming data to client computers as needed. Many of the key technological breakthroughs of WWT relate to this core functionality of efficiently streaming and rendering terapixel-class imagery on the sphere.

From the start, WWT was conceived as a product with educational applications. Central to that vision is the concept of the guided tour, which uses a scripted path through the simulated WWT universe to create an immersive multimedia experience. The most familiar analogy is that of presentation software like PowerPoint: a tour is fundamentally a sort of “document” file that you can open and “play” in WWT. Planetarium shows would typically be created as tours, but the format is more flexible than that: for instance, a desktop user can pause a tour in the middle, explore the sky away from the scripted path, and then return to the tour plan. Tours can include not only text and image overlays as in standard presentation software, but also additional astronomical data sets to augment the core WWT experience. To make this possible, WWT was designed from the ground up with extensibility in mind.

Even though the original WWT client was a Windows application, the systems for WWT’s extensibility were strongly inspired by the successes of the World Wide Web — it’s not a coincidence that WWT data collection files have the exension wtml. The first web-based WWT client (implemented using Silverlight) was launched not long after the Windows client, and as technology has become more and more web-centric this wisdom of this approach has become more and more apparent. We expect that usage of WWT will become increasingly dominated by its web manifestations, with usage of the Windows client likely specializing to tasks that need the power of a full desktop application, such as VR and planetarium shows. One of the major themes of current WWT development effort is to strengthen the web-orientation of the WWT ecosystem and take full advantage of all of the progress that has been made in web-based software engineering since 2008.

Since the project was adopted by the AAS in 2016, there has been an increased emphasis on WWT’s research applications. The same factors that have been pushing an increased emphasis on the web components of WWT have been at play in the broader research data visualization ecosystem, with particular success enjoyed by the Python language inside the Jupyter web notebook system. It was natural for the pywwt Python package to evolve to emphasize this approach, allowing WWT viewers to be embedded in Jupyter notebooks and JupyterLab workspaces. The work to support this effort has also helped draw out the distinction between what is now called the WebGL engine, the reusable WWT rendering library in JavaScript, and the AngularJS WWT web client application that uses that library to deliver an experience that reproduces that of the Windows client.

Key Elements of WWT Infrastructure🔗

Keeping all of these manifestations of WWT in mind, we can start describing the infrastructure needed to support the ecosystem:

  • As an open-source project, the source code is the foundation upon which everything else is built. The WWT source is version-controlled in the WorldWideTelescope organization on GitHub, and to the greatest extent possible the creation of derived products is automated using continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD) techniques, anchored in the aasworldwidetelescope organization on Azure DevOps. An important part of this orientation is that the term “source code” is construed broadly; for instance, the source code to this documentation is managed on GitHub.
  • While some software projects are essentially freestanding, the WWT software relies upon supporting web data services to function. These services are hosted on the Microsoft Azure cloud platform thanks to generous sponsorship from the .NET Foundation.
  • WWT is, in a certain sense, a media platform, even if much of its “content” takes the form of scientific data. Tools for producing and testing that content are vital to the ecosystem, as are the broader network of astronomical data standards like VAMP and the Virtual Observatory (VO) protocols.
  • The other form of content that is essential to WWT is, of course, documentation such as what you’re reading right now and the user-facing WWT web collateral.

The systems underlying these elements will be described in the following sections.