WorldWide Telescope Research Articles

Using the WorldWide Telescope to Develop Science Data Literacy in STEM Undergraduates: A Conceptual Framework and Course Design

Using the WorldWide Telescope to Develop Science Data Literacy in STEM Undergraduates: A Conceptual Framework and Course Design

Impact simulation of Starlink satellites on astronomical observation using worldwide telescope

Along with the generalization and scale deployment of commercial satellite constellations lead by SpaceX Starlink, light pollution caused by satellites has had a serious impact on astronomical observations. In order to provide a friendly tool for simulating and studying the impact of mega-constellation satellites on astronomical observation, two plugin modules for the WorldWide Telescope were designed. The satellite visibility simulation module “Sats Tracker” shows whether and when satellites appear in a specific sky area. The telescope observation module “Obs Simulator” loads and simulates observation plans for telescopes. Combining the two modules, we are able to simulate and assess the influence of constellation satellites on a specific observatory at a given time. As an example application of the new tools, we simulated and analyzed the adverse effects of Starlink satellites on observation at the Xinjiang Altay Observatory, including impacts in general for the observatory site and detailed analysis for specific observation plans. In the simulation, the search for electromagnetic counterparts of gravitational wave events was used as an example of a research topic easily influenced by Starlink and other constellations. The software presented in this paper can be used as an auxiliary tool for observation planning to mitigate the impact of satellite constellations. It also provides an easy-to-use simulation toolkit for the public to understand Starlink and raise their awareness of Dark and Quiet Sky protection.

Optimizing Academic Achievement of Second-Year BSED-Science Students Using Worldwide Telescope (WWT) as an Exploratory Tool in Learning Astronomy

Optimizing Academic Achievement of Second-Year BSED-Science Students Using Worldwide Telescope (WWT) as an Exploratory Tool in Learning Astronomy

IVOA HiPS implementation in the framework of WorldWide Telescope

Abstract The WorldWide Telescope(WWT) is a scientific visualization platform which can browse deep space images, star catalogs, and planetary remote sensing data from different observation facilities in a three-dimensional virtual scene. First launched and then open-sourced by Microsoft Research, the WWT is now managed by the American Astronomical Society (AAS). Hierarchical Progressive Survey (HiPS) is an astronomical data release scheme proposed by Centre de Donnees astronomiques de Strasbourg (CDS) and has been accepted as a recommendation by International Virtual Observatory Alliance (IVOA). The HiPS solution has been adopted widely by many astronomical institutions for data release. Since WWT selected Hierarchical Triangular Mesh (HTM) as the standard for data visualization in the early stage of development, data released by HiPS cannot be visualized in WWT, which significantly limits the application of WWT. This paper introduces the implementation method for HiPS dataset visualization in WWT, and introduces HiPS data projection, mesh rendering, and data index implementation in WWT. Taking Chang’E-2 lunar probe data as an example, this paper introduces how to convert planetary remote sensing data into a HiPS dataset and integrate it into WWT. This paper also compares the efficiency and memory consumption of WWT loading its native data and HiPS data, and illustrates the application of HiPS in scientific data visualization and science education in WWT.

A Hybrid Hands-On And Computer Simulation Laboratory Activity For The Teaching Of Astronomical Parallax

As computer-based visualization techniques are becoming more important across the landscape of astronomy education, this pre-test/post-test study using the Size, Scale, and Structure Concept Inventory (S3CI) looked at the impact of using a hybrid combination of hands-on and computer-based activities on the learning of five semesters of non-science majoring undergraduates learning about the concept of astronomical parallax. The hybrid laboratory activity comprises an outdoor component where students use the parallax method to determine the distances to nearby objects, and a computer visualization component using the American Astronomical Society’s WorldWide Telescope astronomical visualization software. This activity was implemented as part of an undergraduate astronomy course for non-science majors. Based on an analysis of student responses, we conclude that this activity can help students understand the parallax method as applied in the astronomical realm. However, even after instruction, students had difficulty recognizing this method as the primary means for determining distances in astronomy.

Octahedron-based Projections as Intermediate Representations for Computer Imaging: TOAST, TEA, and More.

This paper defines and discusses a set of rectangular all-sky projections that have no singular points, notably the Tesselated Octahedral Adaptive Spherical Transformation (or TOAST) developed initially for the WorldWide Telescope. These have proven to be useful as intermediate representations for imaging data where the application transforms dynamically from a standardized internal format to a specific format (projection, scaling, orientation, etc.) requested by the user. TOAST is strongly related to the Hierarchical Triangular Mesh pixelization and is particularly well adapted to situations where one wishes to traverse a hierarchy of images increasing in resolution. Because it can be recursively computed using a very simple algorithm it is particularly adaptable to use with graphical processing units.

AAS WorldWide Telescope: A Seamless, Cross-platform Data Visualization Engine for Astronomy Research, Education, and Democratizing Data

The American Astronomical Society's WorldWide Telescope (WWT) project enables terabytes of astronomical images, data, and stories to be viewed and shared among researchers, exhibited in science museums, projected into full-dome immersive planetariums and virtual reality headsets, and taught in classrooms from middle school to college levels. We review the WWT ecosystem, how WWT has been used in the astronomical community, and comment on future directions.

The Application of the Montage Image Mosaic Engine to the Visualization of Astronomical Images

The Montage Image Mosaic Engine was designed as a scalable toolkit, written in C for performance and portability across *nix platforms, that assembles FITS images into mosaics. This code is freely available and has been widely used in the astronomy and IT communities for research, product generation, and for developing next-generation cyber-infrastructure. Recently, it has begun finding applicability in the field of visualization. This development has come about because the toolkit design allows easy integration into scalable systems that process data for subsequent visualization in a browser or client. The toolkit it includes a visualization tool suitable for automation and for integration into Python: mViewer creates, with a single command, complex multi-color images overlaid with coordinate displays, labels, and observation footprints, and includes an adaptive image histogram equalization method that preserves the structure of a stretched image over its dynamic range. The Montage toolkit contains functionality originally developed to support the creation and management of mosaics, but which also offers value to visualization: a background rectification algorithm that reveals the faint structure in an image; and tools for creating cutout and downsampled versions of large images. Version 5 of Montage offers support for visualizing data written in HEALPix sky-tessellation scheme, and functionality for processing and organizing images to comply with the TOAST sky-tessellation scheme required for consumption by the World Wide Telescope (WWT). Four online tutorials allow readers to reproduce and extend all the visualizations presented in this paper.

Inquiry-Based Learning of Astronomy with WorldWide Telescope

Inquiry-Based Learning of Astronomy with WorldWide Telescope

Classification of Spectra of Emission Line Stars Using Machine Learning Techniques

Advances in the technology of astronomical spectra acquisition have resulted in an enormous amount of data available in world-wide telescope archives. It is no longer feasible to analyze them using classical approaches, so a new astronomical discipline, astroinformatics, has emerged. We describe the initial experiments in the investigation of spectral line profiles of emission line stars using machine learning with attempt to automatically identify Be and B[e] stars spectra in large archives and classify their types in an automatic manner. Due to the size of spectra collections, the dimension reduction techniques based on wavelet transformation are studied as well. The result clearly justifies that machine learning is able to distinguish different shapes of line profiles even after drastic dimension reduction.

Using Modern Technologies to Capture and Share Indigenous Astronomical Knowledge

Indigenous Knowledge is important for Indigenous communities across the globe and for the advancement of our general scientific knowledge. In particular, Indigenous astronomical knowledge integrates many aspects of Indigenous Knowledge, including seasonal calendars, navigation, food economics, law, ceremony, and social structure. We aim to develop innovative ways of capturing, managing, and disseminating Indigenous astronomical knowledge for Indigenous communities and the general public for the future. Capturing, managing, and disseminating this knowledge in the digital environment poses a number of challenges, which we aim to address using a collaborative project involving experts in the higher education, library, and industry sectors. Using Microsoft's WorldWide Telescope and Rich Interactive Narratives technologies, we propose to develop software, media design, and archival management solutions to allow Indigenous communities to share their astronomical knowledge with the world on their terms and in a culturally sensitive manner.

Online visualization of geospatial stream data using the worldwide telescope

This demo presents the ongoing effort to meld the stream query processing capabilities of Microsoft StreamInsight with the visualization capabilities of the WorldWide Telescope. This effort provides visualization opportunities to manage, analyze, and process real-time information that is of spatio-temporal nature. The demo scenario is based on detecting, tracking and predicting interesting patterns over historical logs and real-time feeds of earthquake data.

Data-intensive science: The Terapixel and MODISAzure projects

We live in an era in which scientific discovery is increasingly driven by data exploration of massive datasets. Scientists today are envisioning diverse data analyses and computations that scale from the desktop to supercomputers, yet often have difficulty designing and constructing software architectures to accommodate the heterogeneous and often inconsistent data at scale. Moreover, scientific data and computational resource needs can vary widely over time. The needs grow as the science collaboration broadens or as additional data is accumulated; the computational demand can have large transients in response to seasonal field campaigns or new instrumentation breakthroughs. Cloud computing can offer a scalable, economic, on-demand model that is well matched to some of these evolving science needs. This paper presents two of our experiences over the last year — the Terapixel Project, using workflow, high-performance computing and non-structured query language data processing to render the largest astronomical image for the WorldWide Telescope, and MODISAzure, a science pipeline for image processing, deployed using the Azure Cloud infrastructure.

Building the WorldWide Telescope

This paper is talks about the critical role that Jim Gray played in the creation of the WorldWide Telescope software. Contrary to what you might think it wasn't his database brilliance that made it happen, it was his generosity in sharing credit, inspiring, nurturing and connecting people, in this case that made it possible for the pieces to come into place and make it happen. Without Jim Gray's work with Alex Szalay on Sky Server and their ongoing support and encouragement, the software that is named in their honor would not exist today.

The world-wide telescope

Mining vast databases of astronomical data, this new online way to see the global structure of the universe promises to be not only a wonderful virtual telescope but an archetype for the evolution of computational science.

The world-wide telescope.

The world-wide telescope.