Microsoft’s WorldWide Telescope brings final frontier to your desktop

Where is Saturn in the sky, in relation to the Moon? Does the Milky Way really have a supermassive black hole at its centre? What’s special about gamma-ray blasts, anyway? With the Universe at your fingertips, you can discover the answers for yourself.

That’s the promise of Microsoft’s WorldWide Telescope, a free service that allows you to tour the night sky from your computer using high-resolution images from the world’s best land- and space-based telescopes. The service combines terabytes of incredible imagery and data with easy-to-use software for viewing and moving through all the information. If you have access to reasonably fast broadband, you can download the 20 MB file in a few minutes.

The application is a blend of software and Web 2.0 services created with the Microsoft high performance Visual Experience Engine, which allows seamless panning and zooming around the heavens with rich image environments. WorldWide Telescope stitches together high-resolution images of celestial bodies and displays them in a way that relates to their actual position in the sky.

You can freely browse through the solar system and far beyond, or take advantage of a growing number of guided tours of the sky hosted by astronomers and educators at major universities and planetariums. The tours look like seamless video with narration and music but are totally interactive; you can pause at any time and explore an object, get more information, or see what it looks like in different wavelengths from different telescopes. You then can return to the guided tour when you choose. When the tour is over, you can rate it, and WorldWide Telescope suggests related tours that you can see with a single click.

You can even choose a telescope (for example, the Hubble, the Chandra X-Ray Observatory or the Spitzer) and view the Universe through different wavelengths to reveal hidden structures in various parts of the galaxy. Taken as a whole, the application provides a top-to-bottom view of the science of astronomy.

Nasa, along with a range of other organisations and academic institutions, worked with Microsoft Research to provide the imagery, provide feedback on the application from a scientific point of view, and turn WorldWide Telescope into a rich learning application. Microsoft Research is releasing WorldWide Telescope as a free service to the astronomy and education communities in the hope that it will inspire and empower kids of all ages to explore and understand the Universe.

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