Have you ever found yourself staring proudly at the collection of beautiful and exotic galaxies that fill your favourites list? Have you ever wanted to share these objects with a friend or loved one and realized there was just no easy way to do it? Sure, you can click on the image, delve into SkyServer, and copy and paste one image at a time into an email, but… That gets kind of tedious pretty quickly, and if your favourites list is like mine, it’s not a 5-minute copy and paste kind of task.
Well, now there is an easier way to inflict your favourites on others.
We’re excited to announce the integration of WorldWide Telescope with Galaxy Zoo favorites. Over the past few months we have had the opportunity to work with Microsoft Research to bring your favorite galaxies to WorldWide Telescope. Instead of seeing an isolated image of the galaxy you can now immerse yourself in the WorldWide Telescope environment through easy to save and easy to share sky tours. We hope this allows you to better see your galaxies in their home environments on the sky.
This new tool, available at http://wwt.galaxyzoo.org, was created by two of my Southern Illinois University Edwardsville undergraduate students: sophomores Jarod Luebbert and Mark Sands. To give you a taste of how this interface works, they’ve created this great teaser video. We plan to push this out to the public on September 2, but because you’re reading this, you get a special sneak peak of both the website and the video.
Galaxy Zoo – WorldWide Telescope Mashup! from Galaxy Zoo on Vimeo.
WOW Looks good!
Ah, makes sense now. Looking good! I like the vid!
That’s really nice. In two actual steps you get to see the tour you just created. NICE!
I like it!
I went there and put up a little run, but had some problems. Is it necessary to get a VIMEO account to do this?
There are some other issues that seem relevant. Where do we address that?
You don’t need a VIMEO account to generate a World Wide Telescope tour. Feel free to discuss problems on the forum or drop us an email at Team At Galaxyzoo.org
Hi Pamela,
This interface looks really neat. I just thought I’d mention work I’ve done with astronomers at Portsmouth, working with Microsofts’ arch enemy Google [or one of them!].
I’ve also enabled user created favourite-galaxy tours, and some tours narrated by experts, which run in Google Earth. See
http://tours.galaxyzoo.org/
and
http://galaxyzoo.org/galaxy_tours
Cheers,
Ben.
Nice work! We are moving forward! Glad to see it. Now that is progress.