Submitted by Stance: A free program launched today will effectively turn every computer that downloads it into a mini-planetarium capable of displaying high resolution images of millions of stars, planets and other celestial bodies. The project, called the WorldWide Telescope (WWT), is the result of several years of hard labour by a small team at Microsoft Research, the software company's key R&D centre. It has drawn lavish praise from some of the world's leading space scientists and educators, including Dr Roy Gould of the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics. "Galileo's telescope started to give us views of the universe that no one else had seen before and we started asking what was out there and why. And I think the WorldWide Telescope is going to do the same thing for the rest of us," he said in a telephone interview. "In terms of pushing the envelope, this really pushes the envelope." The program works in the same way as many online mapping tools, allowing users to zoom around on an interactive canvas combining images and data drawn from the world's leading astronomical research organisations. At launch, the WWT has access to 12 terabytes of data - enough to fill the equivalent of 1.2 million books. But like the universe, this will expand as new images are added. Dr Gould believes the WWT will give amateur astronomers and even complete novices an opportunity to assist the scientific community in furthering their research. "This is going to change our relationship with the night sky in a significant way," he said.WWT is being offered without strings attached from today as an educational tool and was created to honour the memory of the late Dr Jim Gray, a leading Microsoft computer scientist who was lost at sea in 2007. Dr Gray believed that the vast amount of space data being collected would change astronomy from being an observational science into a computational one, said Dr Curtis Wong, a leading Microsoft research scientist and the head of the WWT project.
Visit the World Wide Telescope web site to download it free.
View: Full Article | Source: Sydney Morning Herald
