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.

Pluto and Dwarf Planets

Pluto and Dwarf Planets

This tour explores bodies in our solar system that are too small to be classified as planets and too large to be comets. It answers the questions: What is a dwarf planet? Why isn’t Pluto a planet anymore? How was Pluto discovered? What are properties of the other known dwarf planets Eris, Ceres, Makemake and Haumea?  [5 min]... Read more about Pluto and Dwarf Planets

Retrograde Motion

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 phenomenon of retrograde motion.... Read more about Retrograde Motion

The Juno Mission

The Juno Mission

This tour follows the path of the Juno spacecraft as is travels to Jupiter. It answers the questions: Why study Jupiter? How did Juno travel to Jupiter? What does Juno look like? What did Juno discover once it reached Jupiter? [4.5 min]... Read more about The Juno Mission

The Sun

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 our sun.... Read more about The Sun

Tidal Locking

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 concept of tidal locking.... Read more about Tidal Locking

Volcanic Earth

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 some volcanic sites on our planet.... Read more about Volcanic Earth