WWT Tours & Media

What are WWT Tours?

"Tours" are interactive paths through the night sky, designed to tell a story or teach a particular astronomy concept.  They look like movies, but when viewed in WWT, you can pause the tour to explore regions of the sky that catch your interest, and you can click on hyperlinks throughout the tour to learn more about an object or phenomenon. You can view tours on the web client of WWT or in the full desktop version. The links below have brief descriptions of tours we recommend. Most tour descriptions on this site have a screen capture video version of the tour. For tours that are not released as part of WWT, we have included the tour file that you can play in the desktop version of WWT to view the fully interactive version.

Birth of a Star like Our Sun

Our sun, and other stars like it, do not remain exactly as they appear now. Stellar lifetimes are much longer than ours, but like us, they progress though stages of life. The story of these stages tells us about the formation of the planets and their fate in the events to come billions of years from now. In this tour, we investigate the life cycle of stars like our sun.... Read more about Birth of a Star like Our Sun

Center of the Milky Way

Tour of the radio wavelength view of the inner Galaxy. We start by reviewing all-sky views in various wavelenghts and then zoom into a radio view of Sagittarius A and finally into Sagittarius A*, the location of the supermassive black hole at the Galactic Center.... Read more about Center of the Milky Way

Cosmic Rays

This is a tour developed by the students of Prof. Stella Offner for use in her Astro 101 course at U. Mass Amherst. This tour introduces cosmic rays and their impact.... Read more about Cosmic Rays

Dust and Us

"Dust & Us" is a brief tour of the dark regions in galaxies that form stars and planets.  This tour gives a new perspective on how important dust, which we normally think of as a nuisance, is to creating planets like the one upon which we live.... Read more about Dust and Us

Dwarf Planets

This is a tour developed by the students of Prof. Stella Offner for use in her Astro 101 course at U. Mass Amherst. This tour introduces the five dwarf planets in our solar system.... Read more about Dwarf Planets

Eccentricity

This is part of a series of tours developed by Prof. Stella Offner for use in her Astro 101 course at U. Mass Amherst. She uses WWT to introduce new concepts at the beginning of each lecture. This tour discusses the shapes of different orbits around our sun.... Read more about Eccentricity

Fulani Skies

Fulani Skies was created with WWT for use in the Smithsonian Exhibit African Cosmos: Stellar Art exhibit that ran June 20, 2012—December 9, 2012. The African Cosmos project considers the rich, complex and little-studied topic of African cultural astronomy and the arts as a way to challenge popularly-held notions of Africans as cultural, but not scientific, beings.... Read more about Fulani Skies

Galilean Moons

This is part of a series of tours developed by Prof. Stella Offner for use in her Astro 101 course at U. Mass Amherst. She uses WWT to introduce new concepts at the beginning of each lecture. This tour introduces the four largest moons of Jupiter.... Read more about Galilean Moons

Galileo's New Order

To commemorate the 400th anniversary of Galileo's discovery of moons around Jupiter, we have produced a WWT Tour recreating these historic observations. This is an example of the kind of teaching Ambassadors will be able to do using WWT.... Read more about Galileo's New Order

Gas Giants

This is part of a series of tours developed by Prof. Stella Offner for use in her Astro 101 course at U. Mass Amherst. She uses WWT to introduce new concepts at the beginning of each lecture. This tour introduces the gas giants in our solar system.... Read more about Gas Giants

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