Microsoft’s WorldWide Telescope

Microsoft recently introduced a new web application that allows computers to function as virtual telescopes bringing together imagery from the best ground and Space-based telescopes in the world. As a result, users have a chance to virtually explore the universe, using a sizable number of 'tours'. The 'tours' are interactive, allowing the user to pause, play, rewind, and fast forward the animation at any given time.

Microsoft is offering a growing number of tours of the sky, guided by astronomers and educators from some of the most famous observatories and planetariums in the U.S., including Harvard Astronomer Alyssa Goodman and University of Chicago Cosmologist Mike Gladders. Each tour elaborates on a different subject, such as the condensing of the Milky Way in to stars and planets and the bending of light, which lets us see billions of years in to the past.

Microsoft used its Visual Experience Engine to generate the WorldWide Telescope; the telescope allows seamless panning and zooming around the night sky, planets, and picture environments. Thanks to the new know-how, the sky can be viewed from multiple wavelengths- X-ray, visible light, and Hydrogen Alpha are several of the views that can be cross-faded in to each other. Other methods to explore our sky include tours of the Moon and of chosen planets.

The project was initiated by renowned Microsoft Senior Researcher Jim Grey. The WorldWide Telescope is built on top of Gray's pioneering development of large-scale, high-performance online databases, including SkyServer, and his contributions to the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, a project whose purpose is to map a immense part of the Northern sky outside of the galaxy. Microsoft Research has announced that the release of WorldWide Telescope was made as a tribute and it hopes it will contribute to the astronomy and schooling communities. Roy Gould, a Researcher at the Harvard-Smithsonian Middle for Astrophysics, said: "I think this new creation from Microsoft will have a profound impact on the way they view the universe."

The idea behind Microsoft's new project it to try and combine images, information, and tales from multiple sources in to a rich media experience. The project's creation involved other organizations besides Microsoft Research, and members of the academic, educational and scientific communities helped to make WorldWide Telescope a reality. NASA, along with other organizations, collaborated with Microsoft Research to provide the imagery, provide feedback on the application from a scientific point of view, and help turn the WorldWide Telescope in to a rich learning application.