“Layers” are individual graphical elements in AAS WorldWide Telescope that can be added or manipulated to build up complex scenes in the WWT rendering engine. If you’re loading an individual image or tabular data set into WWT, you’re creating a layer — but layers are also the building blocks for the construction of professional-grade planetarium shows or web-based explanatory tours. This guide describes how to create various layers in WWT and demonstrates some of the more sophisticated things you can do with them.
If you just want to get your scientific imagery or tabular data into WWT to view them, the shortest path forward is to use pywwt inside JupyterLab. Meanwhile, if you need to understand how to process your data so that they can be added as WWT layers, consult the Data Guide.