Modifying visual settings¶

Once a Jupyter or Qt widget has been created, the way in which you change settings and interact with WorldWide Telescope is the same.

Visual settings¶

Once the WorldWide Telescope Jupyter or Qt widget has been initialized – here we assign it to the variable name wwt – you can toggle several visual settings on and off. For example:

>>> wwt.constellation_boundaries = True


shows the boundaries of the formally defined regions for each constellation. You can show the constellations themselves by changing another setting:

>>> wwt.constellation_figures = True


These two settings and constellation_selection also have complementary settings that change their colors. These settings take either color names, string hex codes, tuples of (red, green, blue) values (where each value should be in the range [0:1]) tuples or more generally anything recognized by the matplotlib.colors.to_hex() function from Matplotlib:

>>> wwt.constellation_boundary_color = 'azure'
>>> wwt.constellation_figure_color = '#D3BC8D'
>>> wwt.constellation_selection_color = (1, 0, 1)


Numerical settings all take values as Astropy astropy.units.Quantity objects, which are floating point values with associated units. To demonstrate this, let’s say you’d like to simulate the celestial view from the top of the tallest building in Santiago, Chile. You would then enter:

>>> from astropy import units as u
>>> wwt.local_horizon_mode = True
>>> wwt.location_latitude = -33.4172 * u.deg
>>> wwt.location_longitude = -70.604 * u.deg
>>> wwt.location_altitude = 300 * u.meter


All of the preceding code results in the following view:

Screenshots like the one above are saved through a widget method that takes your desired file name its argument:

>>> wwt.render('stgo_view.png')


Centering on coordinates¶

While you can click and drag to pan around and use scrolling to zoom in and out, it’s also possible to programmatically center the view on a particular object or region of the sky, given a certain set of coordinates in the form of an astropy SkyCoord object and a field of view (zoom level in astropy pixel units) for the viewer. You can read more about creating SkyCoord objects here. One of the useful features of this class is the ability to create coordinates based on an object name, so we can use this here to center on a particular object:

>>> from astropy import units as u
>>> from astropy.coordinates import SkyCoord
>>> coord = SkyCoord.from_name('Alpha Centauri')
>>> wwt.center_on_coordinates(coord, fov=10 * u.deg)


Foreground/background layers¶

Up to two image layers can be shown in the viewer. The viewer’s ability to display multiple layers allows users to visually compare large all-sky surveys and smaller studies. As the example below shows, they also add a good amount of aesthetic value for tours or general use. The foreground and background layers can be set using the foreground and background attributes:

>>> wwt.background = 'Fermi LAT 8-year (gamma)'
>>> wwt.foreground = 'Planck Dust & Gas'
>>> wwt.foreground_opacity = .75


The code above superimposes a dust and gas map on an all-sky gamma ray intensity survey and produces the following output:

You can currently choose from about 20 layers of different wavelengths, scopes, and eras; you can list them using the widget’s available_layers method:

>>> wwt.available_layers
['2MASS: Catalog (Synthetic, Near Infrared)', '2Mass: Imagery (Infrared)',
'Black Sky Background', 'Digitized Sky Survey (Color)',
'Fermi LAT 8-year (gamma)', 'GALEX (Ultraviolet)', 'GALEX 4 Far-UV',
'GALEX 4 Near-UV', 'Hydrogen Alpha Full Sky Map',
'IRIS: Improved Reprocessing of IRAS Survey (Infrared)',
'Planck CMB', 'Planck Dust & Gas', 'RASS: ROSAT All Sky Survey (X-ray)',
'SDSS: Sloan Digital Sky Survey (Optical)', 'SFD Dust Map (Infrared)',
'Tycho (Synthetic, Optical)',
'USNOB: US Naval Observatory B 1.0 (Synthetic, Optical)',
'VLSS: VLA Low-frequency Sky Survey (Radio)', 'WISE All Sky (Infrared)',
'WMAP ILC 5-Year Cosmic Microwave Background']


Running tours¶

Also present are methods that allow you to load, pause, and resume tours from the WWT website. To load and play a tour, use the load_tour() method:

>>> wwt.load_tour('http://www.worldwidetelescope.org/docs/wtml/tourone.wtt')


You can pause and resume it using the pause_tour() and resume_tour() methods.