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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.

John Huchra's Universe

John Huchra, former president of the American Astronomical Society, passed away on October 8, 2010.

John’s colleagues at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, in collaboration with the creators of WorldWide Telescope at Microsoft Research, have created a new, interactive, WWT Tour to honor John and his career. 

The Tour primarily focuses on John’s quest to map the Universe.... Read more about John Huchra's Universe

Leaving 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 the surface of Mars.... Read more about Leaving Earth

Life Cycle of Stars 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 Life Cycle of Stars Like Our Sun

Many Worlds

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 geological features of different bodies in our solar system.... Read more about Many Worlds

Moon

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 different phases of the moon.... Read more about Moon

Northern Hemisphere

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 view of the sky from the northern hemisphere.... Read more about Northern Hemisphere

Our Moon

Our Moon

This tour explores the origins and properties of our Moon. It answers the questions: When and how was it formed? What is it made of? What is its surface like? Why is it our moon? [5 min]... Read more about Our Moon

Parallax

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 how one's viewpoint affects the apparent location of different objects.... Read more about Parallax

Pluto

A visit to Pluto using WWT's new 3D mode, showing some of the reasons why it was reclassified as a dwarf planet.... Read more about Pluto