Robert Hurt (IPAC)

The AAS WorldWide Telescope Project: Data Contextualization for Outreach, Research, Archives, and Online Publications: WorldWide Telescope (WWT), a software tool originally developed by Microsoft Research, has subsequently been spun off as an open source software project. The AAS council voted this past January to adopt it as its first in-house outreach and technology project. WWT consists of a Windows desktop client package, an HTML5 web client, several simplified web modules, and a large collection of tiled multi-resolution datasets spanning individual images to full sky surveys. The WWT client allows for a variety of data lookups, VOTable and FITS file imports. WWT was the first application to support the Astronomy Visualization Metadata (AVM) standard employed for all of the current IPAC public release imagery, and the AstroPix site at IPAC offers the most complete collection of WWT-ready imagery available.