Questions

• Integrating Images to Sky Mode with WWT
• How to Make a WWT Slide Show
• Adding Custom Images to the Full Dome/Sphere

Integrating Images to Sky Mode WWT

Astronomical Visualization Metadata (AVM) is a way to storing information about the original astronomical image in the header of a standard image file, such as TIFF and JPEG. This standard uses existing header infrastructure and populates it with astronomy-specific metadata. The relevant metadata to WWT is:

• Image Name
• URL
• Credits
• Caption
• World Coordinate System (WCS) coordinate information

The idea behind AVM is to allow visualizers to manipulate colors, add annotations etc. and maintain the description of that manipulation – e.g., original data location, color representation – so that subsequent people know how it was created and how to interpret it. For WWT, coordinates allow the image to be placed at the correct location on the sky.

You can download AVM-tagged data from a variety of data sources. If your favorite source of image data provider doesn’t currently include AVM tags, you can direct them to the AVM resources below. If you want to get a test image, you can browse for one on the Astropix website, which aggregates AVM-tagged images. Once you have it, you can add the data to WWT by:

1. Make sure you are in Sky Mode.
2. Under the Explore Tab, click on Open/Astronomical Image…
3. Browse to the appropriate file.
4. WWT will load the data into WWT and add it to a default collection called “Open Collections,” shown in the upper left-hand part of WWT. You can right click and add it to a collection of your choice for image organization after you have loaded it.