For many people, looking into the night sky is a hobby and
for some a downright passion. Only a select few are able to use the massive
telescopes that are located around the country to view deep space objects up
close and personal.
Microsoft showed off a very cool application called the
WorldWide Telescope at the TED Conferences in California. Basically the program
will take images from a variety of Earth based telescopes and the Hubble space
Telescope and allows users to view celestial objects.
The application is said to work sort of like Google Earth’s
sky feature. Windows users would be able to pick any portion of the night sky
and zoom in as far as the available data allows. The application would also allow
users to view celestial bodies like nova’s, other galaxies and planets from
their desktop.
Microsoft showed off a short demo of the application with
Dr. Roy Gould from the Harvard Center for Astrophysics at TED2008. Gould said,
“The WorldWide Telescope takes the best images from the greatest telescopes on
Earth ... and in space ... and assembles them into a seamless, holistic view of
the universe. This new resource will change the way we do astronomy ... the way
we teach astronomy ... and, most importantly, I think it's going to change the
way we see ourselves in the universe. The creators of the WorldWide Telescope
have now given us a way to have a dialogue with our universe.”
Microsoft has a website set up for
WorldWide Telescope and describes the application as "a rich visualization environment that functions as a virtual telescope, bringing together imagery from the best ground- and space telescopes to enable seamless, guided explorations of the universe."
Microsoft says that the WorldWide Telescope application will
be available in Spring of 2008 free of charge. The Hubble Space Telescope,
which is the source of some images uses for the WoldWide Telescope project, is set to be replaced in 2013.