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What is OpenWWT?

WorldWide Telescope began in 2007 as a research project, led from within Microsoft Research. Early partners included astronomers and educators from Caltech, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Northwestern, the University of Chicago, and several NASA facilities. Thanks to these collaborations and Microsoft’s leadership, WWT reached its goal of creating a free unified contextual visualization of the Universe with global reach that lets users explore multispectral imagery, all of which is deeply connected to scholarly publications and online research databases.

Now the WorldWide Telescope is becoming an open-source project, OpenWWT. This will enable any individual or organization to adapt and extend the functionality of WorldWide Telescope to meet any research or educational need. Extensions to the software will continuously enhance astronomical research, formal and informal learning, and public outreach.

There are different elements to OpenWWT, and they will be gradually added to GitHub, as their source is prepared for consumption by the community.

##OpenWWT Repositories This section describes the individual repositories that contain the source code, tools, and resources for WorldWide Telescope.

###openwwt-webclient

The openwwt-webclient repo contains the source code for the web client of OpenWWT, which provides a basic cross-platform, browser-based experience. Currently, Internet Explorer 11 (Windows) and Chrome (Windows, Mac) offer the best performance.

The HTML5 SDK shows how to build custom applications using the WorldWide Telescope web client.

Additional information will be added here as each new repository is made public. ###Coming Soon

• OpenWWT Windows Client

• OpenWWT Tools