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.

 

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64 results

64 results

Astronomy and Astrology
This tour explores the differences between astronomy and astrology. It answers the questions: What is the definition of each? How are the signs of the zodiac defined? [3 min] Credits Teiyana Nolan The full version of this tour can be downloaded here (by...
Astronomy and Astrology

Astronomy for Everyone
A six-minute introduction to Astronomy. This Tour gives a broad overview of many important topics for budding astronomers to explore. Credits Alyssa Goodman, Curtis Wong, Lisa Dettloff, Megan Watzke, Sanjana Sharma
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Astronomy vs. Astrology
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 differences between astronomy and astrology. Credits Kylie Walulak & Alexandra Long The full version of this tour...
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Big Dipper Galaxy Pointing System
Learn to use the Big Dipper to find galaxies in the night sky. Mary, an experienced planetarium show writer, gives a primer on how to find several beautiful galaxies that you can look at with binoculars or a backyard telescope, and she shows you where the...
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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...
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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...
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Cepheid Variable Stars and the Cosmic Distance Ladder
This is a tour developed by Professor Alyssa Goodman at Harvard University. This tour introduces cepheid variable stars and how the relationship between their pulsation periods and their luminosities has helped to estimate cosmic distances. Credits Alyssa...
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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. Credits Joe Katusich & Corey Sullivan The full version of this tour can be downloaded...
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Discoveries of Galileo

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 Galileo's discoveries. Credits Peri Michael & Howard Xu The full version of this tour can be downloaded here (by right...
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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. For more...
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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. Credits Pei-Lun Kao & Andrew Emerson The full version of this tour can be...
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Eagle Nebula
A tour by David a 5th grade student from Issaquah, Washington Credits David, 5th grade student from Issaquah, Washington
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