WorldWide Telescope Academic Development Kit

The WorldWide Telescope (WWT) Academic Development Kit is a cool tool that came out in January 2009. It has two handy utilities that help you turn your astronomical images, panoramas, sky surveys, and planetary textures into formats that WWT can read and share with other users.

Transform Your Images with WWT

This kit produces image pyramids from your photos, along with thumbnails and WTML files. Now, you might wonder what WTML files are. Well, they’re XML files in the WWT format! They link to images on the Internet and keep track of how those images should appear in WWT. Plus, they include metadata like the image title and credits.

SphereToaster Tool for Equirectangular Images

The WWT SphereToaster Tool is another neat feature! It lets you provide images in an equirectangular format that covers all or part of a sphere—think cylindrical projections of panoramas or all-sky surveys. SphereToaster converts these into a different projection system called the TOAST system. This system is unique to WWT! After conversion, it saves an image pyramid of the new TOAST-projected image.

Create Thumbnails Easily

This tool also makes thumbnails and WTML files for easy sharing. On top of that, there's the WWT StudyChopper Tool. It allows users to upload photographs of specific parts of the sky—like a high-resolution shot of the Crab Nebula—and enter precise coordinate info plus metadata. Just like before, it creates image pyramids, thumbnails, and WTML files.

Share Your Work with Others

Once you've got those output image pyramids and thumbnails hosted on your servers along with accessible WTML files, anyone who has access can browse through your amazing images in WWT! Want to get started? You can download it here!