WorldWide Telescope peers into Big Dipper

[Jitway]

 

Microsoft on Wednesday gave TED conference-goers--an audience typically filled with stars like Goldie Hawn or Forest Whitaker--a close-up of real celestial bodies with its new virtual telescope.

 

Microsoft demonstrated long-awaited software called WorldWide Telescope to an audience at the exclusive Technology Entertainment and Design conference in Monterey, Calif., a four-day confab that started Wednesday. It's unclear whether the demo of the astronomy technology made anyone in the audience cry like former Microsoft evangelist Robert Scoble, but the images (shown above) were certainly stellar.

 

WorldWide Telescope, similar to the sky feature in Google Earth but much more expansive, is a virtual map of space that features tens of millions of digital images from sources like the Hubble telescope and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, a project championed by missing Microsoft researcher Jim Gray (to whom Microsoft dedicated the WorldWide Telescope on Wednesday). From the desktop, the technology lets people pan and zoom across the night sky, zeroing in on the Big Dipper, Mars, or the first galaxies to emerge after the Big Bang. It also lets people call up related data, stories, or context about what they're seeing from sources online.

 

 

I can see this trying to be another Google Earth and it may eventual be very interesting but I don't think it will ever fully compare or replace Google Earth for what most users use it for.

 

Full story HERE

[Lucandrake]

Hey that's pretty cool, but like google earth, it won't ever see more then a hours play by my part