Using the WorldWideTelescope in a Classroom Setting

Heather R. Theijsmeijer
CASCA Education Coordinator
Email: cascaed@astro.utoronto.ca

It is not always easy to take your first year astronomy students out to see celestial objects first hand through a telescope. With Microsoft's new WorldWideTelescope (WWT), you may now be able to give them similar experiences, without ever leaving the classroom or lab.

The WWT is Microsoft's answer to GoogleSky, having just been released this past month. It promises guided tours of the sky, narrated by both astronomers and educators, aerial views of the Moon and planets, and a planetarium component for showing what's up in the night sky. If you are starting to think about what you might be teaching in the fall, hopefully this quick review will help you decide whether or not you might be able to use this new tool in your classroom or lab.

Compared to GoogleSky (which is itself a pretty impressive little application, available at http://www.google.com/sky/), my first impression of the WWT was that it was very user-friendly. Right away, you can navigate the planetarium program through the constellations, zooming in on planets and galaxies or locating Messier objects. Easy-to-locate buttons at the top and the bottom of the screen make for easy navigation. And like GoogleSky, or traditional planetarium software like Starry Night, you can grab the sky with the cursor to move around to different viewpoints.

Perhaps the most impressive is that you can change the background (optical) image of the sky to view images from over two dozen sky surveys, such as 2MASS, WMAP or Extreme Ultraviolet Explorer. On a high speed connection, the images take a moment to load - going from blurry to clear - but once loaded make for a very impressive view.

Once you have selected an object in the sky and zoomed in, right-clicking on it allows you to do anything from determining its magnitude and RA/Dec coordinates, to researching more about that object through ADS or even Wikipedia. On the WWT homepage, it even suggests that basic research can be done using these images.

There are a number of ways you could use this application as an interactive teaching tool with your first-year students:

• Browse through the images, and create your own customizable collection or gallery of themed images. These can be shown to your students in a lecture or classroom setting, allowing them to see real images of what you are talking about.

• Have students download the program on their own computers or in a dedicated computer lab, and have them do a “scavenger hunt” assignment as an introduction to course material.

• Likewise, give the students a list of general topics, and have them create their own collections/galleries of images.

• Have students answer questions based on the guided tours available, which cater to both visual and auditory learners.

• Have the students create their own “tours” of the sky that can be presented in class.

• Since the images are taken from actual surveys, more advanced activities can be made which require the students to take measurements or follow links to previous research in order to learn more about a particular object or class of objects.

There are a number of concerns with this application, however. Most importantly, the computer on which the application is installed must be using a Microsoft Windows OS (with preference, they say, to Windows Vista). GoogleSky definitely has the advantage here, as it isn’t OS-specific. The application itself takes up about 1 Gigabyte of hard drive space, and an Internet connection is needed to access the Terabytes of images and information the WWT has to offer. This may make it a difficult application to use in the classroom, depending on your particular circumstances.

There is a large variety of the guided tours mentioned earlier (Planets, Galaxies, Supernovae, etc.), but they need to be downloaded separately. If a number of students are trying to access one particular tour all at once, this might slow down the connection speed. If you choose to do an assignment where the students view the guided tours, perhaps suggest a number of activities so that your students don’t all do the same thing at the same time.

Over the summer, give the application a try. It gives us as teachers another opportunity to reach out to astronomy students in different ways in the classroom, and a new way to make an already exciting subject come to life.

The WorldWideTelescope can be found at http://www.worldwidetelescope.org/ .

CASCA education Webteam (2008)