by Mark Ollig

Created on: June 17, 2008

Study the galaxy using the WorldWide Telescope!


Microsoft has developed a new way to explore the vastness of outer space.

This technology will merge telescope feeds from all over the world and satellites orbiting the Earth.

It will combine these sources to build a wide-ranging view of our universe.

I watched a fascinating video presentation on the Technology, Education and Design (TED) website presented by Roy Gould, a science educator and researcher at the Harvard Center for Astrophysics, and Curtis Wong, manager of Next Media Research for Microsoft.

The TED presentation video was the first public display of the "WorldWide Telescope."

The WorldWide Telescope is a powerful new web-based software tool for exploring the universe and was developed by Curtis Wong of Microsoft Research.

"This new resource will change the way we do astronomy . . . the way we teach astronomy . . . and, most importantly, I think it's going to change the way we see ourselves in the universe," explained Gould.

For us, the WorldWide Telescope promises to be like having a space observatory on our desktop. It will allow us to see the sky in a way we have never seen it before.

The WorldWide Telescope software application will be free to download.

This software will provide individual exploration of "multi-dimensional views" of the stars, planets, nebula clusters and more.

It will be like taking a virtual tour of the universe; only in this case, everything is actually located where it should be. Users will be able to zoom in and out on selected locations in space.

The image locations are placed in the exact position that it would expected to be found in the sky.

Special algorithm programs place objects in the correct distance relationships from each other, depending on where and when we are looking at them.

The Microsoft "Visual Experience Engine" is the technology which provides the high-quality panning and zooming across the night sky.

This visual engine also joins together terabytes worth of images and data queried from numerous sources over the Internet.

The "sky-mode" feature allows users to see high quality images of outer space combined with images from the Hubble space telescope and Earth bound telescopes.

The WorldWide Telescope is built on the work started by Jim Gray of Microsoft and his contributions to the "Sloan Digital Sky Survey" which can be seen at http://cas.sdss.org.

I read parts of Jim Gray's 2002 report he wrote for Microsoft on the WorldWide Telescope.

In it Gray says "The WorldWide

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