To honor Harvard-Smithsonian astronomer John Huchra, who passed away in October 2010, his friends and colleagues at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics have created a new interactive World Wide Telescope tour titled, “John Huchra’s Universe.” Unveiled at the 217th American Astronomical Society meeting in Seattle in January, it is now available online at the Web address: https://wwtambassadors.org/wwt/?q=huchra The free Windows client World Wide Telescope, available at the Web address: https://www.worldwidetelescope.org/ must be downloaded first.
Image right: John P. Huchra (Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard University)
John Huchra was an enthusiastic observer who loved telescopes and helped pioneer the mapping of the universe through the CfA Redshift Surveys, the Two Micron All Sky Survey and many other efforts. The new World Wide Telescope tour chronicles Huchra’s career and many scientific accomplishments, focusing on his quest to map the universe in three dimensions. It is narrated by fellow Harvard professor Robert Kirshner, who first met Huchra when they were both graduate students at Caltech.
This Youtube video offers a non-interactive version of “John Huchra’s Universe”
The tour employs the latest capabilities of World Wide Telescope, a free and very powerful interactive astronomy program from Microsoft Research. There is no Mac client at present, but a Web-based “2D” version of World Wide Telescope is available for Intel Macs running OS X and Microsoft Silverlight 3.0 (it works on PCs too).
