Microsoft's Launches 'Worldwide Telescope'

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Microsoft has finally released the Spring Beta of the highly anticipated 'Worldwide Telescope', a visualization software environment that allows you to use your computer screen as as virtual telescope by sewing together imagery from the world's best ground & space based telescopes allowing you to 'surf' the universe in a seamless, gorgeous experience.

From WorldWideTelescope.com

Choose from a growing number of guided tours of the sky by astronomers and educators from some of the most famous observatories and planetariums in the country. Feel free at any time to pause the tour, explore on your own (with multiple information sources for objects at your fingertips), and rejoin the tour where you left off. Join Harvard Astronomer Alyssa Goodman on a journey showing how dust in the Milky Way Galaxy condenses into stars and planets. Take a tour with University of Chicago Cosmologist Mike Gladders two billion years into the past to see a gravitational lens bending the light from galaxies allowing you to see billions more years into the past.

After hearing about the launch on TechCruch, I installed the application on my computer (Windows only for now) and it was a pretty quick install. If you don't have Microsoft .Net updated to the latest version you'll have to upgrade... but it's worth it.

The moment the environment opened and I made a few moves with my mouse my jaw dropped. It's an amazingly smooth ride as you steer around the constellations. The movement is very similar to that of Google Earth.

WWT allows you to customize your views so that you see only stars, constellations, planets or even the earth. Each item is clickable and movable.

The WWT websites states that the telescope is dedicated to Jim Gray

Microsoft Research is dedicating WorldWide Telescope to the memory of Jim Gray and is releasing WWT as a free resource to the astronomy and education communities with the hope that it will inspire and empower people to explore and understand the universe like never before.

This is quite an application and quite an experience. This will surely take away several hours of my time in the coming days. Visit the website at http://www.worldwidetelescope.org and explore for yourself. This is truly a fantastic new application.