WorldWide Telescope Academic Development Kit

The WorldWide Telescope (WWT) Academic Development Kit, January 2009 release contains two utilities that enable people to convert their astronomical images, panoramas, sky surveys, and planetary textures to a format that can be read by WWT and shared with other WWT users.   The WWT Academic Development Kit will produce image pyramids of the photographs, thumbnails, and WTML files. WTML files are XML files in the WWT format that point to the images on the Internet and store details of how they are to be displayed in WWT and metadata such as image title and credits.

The WWT SphereToaster Tool enables users to provide images in an equirectangular format that covers all or part of the inside or outside of a sphere. This includes, for example, cylindrical projections of panoramas and all-sky surveys. SphereToaster converts these to a different projection system—the TOAST system, currently unique to WWT—and then stores an image pyramid of the resulting TOAST-projected image.

The tool also produces thumbnails and WTML files. The WWT StudyChopper Tool enables users to provide photographs of small parts of the sky, such as a high-resolution image of the Crab Nebula, and enter appropriate coordinate information and metadata. It creates image pyramids of the photographs, thumbnails, and WTML files.

Once the output image pyramids and thumbnails are hosted by the user's servers and the WTML files are made available to others, anyone with access to the WTML files will be able to browse the images in WWT.