Microsoft WorldWide Telescope Now Available at worldwidetelescope.org

Microsoft WorldWide Telescope is a rich Web application that brings together imagery from the best ground and space-based observatories like Hubble Space Telescope, the Chandra X-Ray Observatory Center, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and others across the world to allow people to easily explore the night sky through their computers.

“The WorldWide Telescope is a powerful tool for science and education that makes it possible for everyone to explore the universe,” said Bill Gates, chairman of Microsoft.

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 terabytes of high-resolution images of celestial bodies and displays them in a way that relates to their actual position in the sky.

People can freely browse through the solar system, galaxy and beyond, or take advantage of a growing number of guided tours of the sky hosted by astronomers and educators at major universities and planetariums.

“Users can see the X-ray view of the sky, zoom into bright radiation clouds, and then cross-fade into the visible light view and discover the cloud remnants of a supernova explosion from a thousand years ago,” said Roy Gould, a researcher at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. “I believe this new creation from Microsoft will have a profound impact on the way we view the universe.”

WorldWide Telescope is created with the Microsoft high performance Visual Experience Engine and allows seamless panning and zooming around the night sky, planets, and image environments. The user can view the sky from multiple wavelengths and see the x-ray view of the sky and zoom into bright radiation clouds and then crossfade into the visible light view and discover the cloud remnants of a supernova explosion from a thousand years ago.

By switching to the Hydrogen Alpha view, user can see the distribution and illumination of massive primordial hydrogen cloud structures lit up by the high energy radiation coming from nearby stars in the Milky Way.

Seamlessly pan and zoom from aerial views of the Moon and selected planets, as well as see their precise positions in the sky from any location on Earth and any time in the past or future with the Microsoft Visual Experience Engine.

Want to see the same images that scientists at NASA use for their research or perform your own research with those images? Or do you want to see the Earth from the same perspective that astronauts see as they descend to Earth? How about taking a 5 minute break and viewing a panorama of a different city? Install WorldWide Telescope and start your explorations. To download visit www.worldwidetelescope.org