[geeks] World Wide Telescope

[Mark]

On 1 Mar 2008, at 00:50, Sridhar Ayengar wrote:

> Mark wrote:
>> I had to pinch myself twice when I realised it was from Microsoft  
>> and it was free product, but it look drop-dead amazing.

> But what is it exactly?  Your subject doesn't say much and I can't  
> look it up right now.


Sorry. I should have explained better. Basically, it's a interactive  
guide to the universe. It works kinda like Google Earth, you pan  
around, zoom in and out on stuff and can explore the universe as a  
whole, in context. The software itself gathers contents from online  
sources and contains imagery from pretty much every major world  
telescope, as well as data from a variety of sources. Simply put, it's  
an intuitive interactive tool for wandering our universe and seeing  
everything mankind can see all in one place. The ability to look at a  
'star' in the night sky and be able to zoom in so far that you can see  
it is actually 2 galaxies merging together, well it's amazing.

I know there are a lot of programs about that allow you to do this  
already, Stellarium and Celestia come to mind, but there's something  
about WWT that just seems so much nicer, it just seems much more  
usable than anything else I've seen. I'll reserve total judgement for  
when I actually use it but from the demo it looks amazing. You really  
need to see the demo to get the drift.

One nice feature is you can publish a tour on WWT, that anyone can  
take. These can be made by astronomers, or Joe Soap on the street, so  
if you are particularly obsessed by a constellation or a nebula you  
can tell folks about it while showing them the parts of it in amazing  
detail. I'm gonna do some reading and do my own of Orion when it comes  
out I think.

Like I say, I'm rarely grabbed by both shoulders and given a true  
reason to be excited by something, especially from Redmond, but this  
really has me gassed. I want to get my paws on it.

The only potential downer is it's (of course) Windows only, That  
doesn't bother me as I have a dedicated XP box to hand. It might  
bother other folks but... well frankly I couldn't give less of a crap ;)

-- 
Mark Benson

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