I had this idea for a contest as I was trying to add images to the Worldwide Telescope Client. I need your help!
Here are the details of the contest.
I want to add this image to Worldwide Telescope:
That is an amazing image of the Horsehead Nebula taken to celebrate the 23rd anniversary of the Hubble Space Telescope. What's great about it is the level of detail one can see in the infrared wavelengths of the Wide Field Camera 3 on Hubble.
The problem is, I can't just copy and paste the image into Worldwide Telescope. In order to know where to place the image in the sky and scale it properly, WWT needs more information, namely the World Coordinate System (WCS) information. Usually, that information is in the headers of the science data in FITS format, but these images are jpegs and png's, not FITS.
To give jpg images processed for science outreach, NASA and others have developed a header for these images called the Astronomy Visualization Metadata (AVM) which is essentially a FITS header for jpgs and pngs.
More about AVM here:
So the trick is to get the WCS data from the FITS images into the AVM header for the Horsehead jpg and then WWT will know what to do with it. To get the FITS images, we can go to the MAST Archive where all Hubble data are kept and get the Horsehead files:
And search using Target Name=Horsehead and Prop ID=12812
That will return 14 or so FITS images. Download them all and get the WCS info from them and put them in the AVM header in the Horsehead jpgs.
So, the challenge: create an AVM header that will import into the WWT for the Horsehead image linked to above.
Here are some links that might help.
Link to a howto from STScI:
Some AVM resources:
The PRIZE:
First up, you'll get my undying respect and a request to make some more for WWT. You'll also be contributing to a great resource for astronomy outreach. You'll also get a brand new (personalized - YOUR NAME) t-shirt from our growing list on out Teespring Store:
Let's have FUN!
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