pywwt Reference Documentation

The pywwt package is the official toolkit for visualizing astronomical data in Python using WorldWide Telescope (WWT), a free, open-source astronomy visualization system. WWT includes a sophisticated 4D WebGL rendering engine and a cloud-based web service for sharing and visualizing terabytes of astronomical data. To learn more about WWT, visit the WWT homepage or the WWT documentation hub.

Here’s a live, interactive copy of the WWT research app that lets you explore a 25-gigabyte mosaic of the Andromeda galaxy atop the Pan-STARRS 3pi dataset with sources from the Gaia DR2 catalog overlaid:

pywwt enables you to include this app in Jupyter notebooks and control it programmatically from Python, overlaying your own imagery and catalogs. pywwt also lets you build desktop Qt applications using the same interfaces, control running instances of the WWT Windows application, and more!

Quick start

The quickest way to see what the pywwt can do is to try it out live, which you can do straight in your browser with our cloud-based Jupyter notebooks. Here are some examples:

• Visualize Tabular Data from the NASA Exoplanet Archive

• Visualize Imagery of W5 and SN2011fe

To browse the complete collection of live example notebooks, go to the index page.

Note: it is usually fast to launch these notebooks, but if the code has been recently updated, you may have to wait a few minutes for the backing software images to be rebuilt.

To browse the Python commands that can be used to control WWT once you’ve opened it up, see the documentation of the BaseWWTWidget class.

Table of Contents

• Installing pywwt
  • Try without installing
  • Install pywwt with conda-forge (recommended)
  • Install pywwt with pip
  • Set Up pywwt’s JupyterLab Integration
  • Set up the pywwt Jupyter Widget
  • Dependencies
  • Installing the developer version
• Opening WWT in Python
  • WWT’s JupyterLab application
  • WWT’s Jupyter widget
  • WWT in Qt applications
  • Connecting to the WWT Windows application
• Controlling WWT from Python
  • Basic controls
  • Changing and controlling views
  • Showing annotations
  • Adding data layers
  • Showing fields of view
  • Keyboard shortcuts
  • Running tours

API Reference

• pywwt Package
• pywwt.annotation Module
• pywwt.app Module
• pywwt.core Module
• pywwt.data_server Module
• pywwt.imagery Module
• pywwt.instruments Module
• pywwt.jupyter Module
• pywwt.jupyter_relay Module
• pywwt.jupyter_server Module
• pywwt.layers Module
• pywwt.logger Module
• pywwt.qt Module
• pywwt.solar_system Module
• pywwt.traits Module
• pywwt.utils Module
• pywwt.windows Package
• pywwt.windows.client Module
• pywwt.windows.layer Module
• pywwt.windows.misc Module
• pywwt.windows.mods Module
• pywwt.windows.utils Module

Getting help

If you run into any issues when using pywwt, please open an issue in the pywwt repository on GitHub. We also encourage you to consider asking a question on the WWT discussion forum site.

Acknowledgments

Work on the WorldWide Telescope system has been supported by the American Astronomical Society (AAS), the .NET Foundation, and other partners. See the WWT user website for details.