We’re proud to launch a new website for the AAS WorldWide Telescope (WWT) project! You can find it at https://worldwidetelescope.org/home/. While this new website offers a refreshed look and polished information about what WWT is and why you might want to use it, that’s just the tip of the iceberg — there has been a lot of work behind the scenes with a lot more to come.

WWT image

For instance, the old WWT website had a great deal of content that was useful but very difficult to find. Nearly all of that information has been reorganized and gathered under a new WWT documentation hub. The source code for the WWT manuals is now written in the popular MarkDown format and hosted on GitHub — a framework that we hope will present the lowest possible barrier to anyone who would like to contribute to the documentation.

We’ve also added richer links out to the growing WWT social media ecosystem, including the WWT Forum, the WWT newsletter, the YouTube channel, and the WWT Twitter account. Likewise, you’ll find many more links to assets for developers, such as source code (including the website itself) and support libraries.

Underlying these upgrades is a big shift to the infrastructure powering the worldwidetelescope.org domain. While the details of this change won’t be interesting to the typical user — we can now do path-based routing of HTTP requests using a reverse proxy with TLS termination, it made this update possible and unlocked possibilities for major improvements across the WWT web presence (e.g., the web client).

To stay informed about the latest improvements to WWT, sign up for our newsletter. If you have any questions or ideas about the new website, or any other topic, you can always email the project director Peter Williams.