Microsoft’s WorldWide Telescope Now Available Online

WorldWide Telescope
WorldWide Telescope Online Features:
Access to hundreds of terabytes of sky, earth and planet data
Ability to navigate seamlessly through 3D spherical environments
Finder Scope to quickly identify astronomical objects
Instant thumbnail previews of tens of thousands of popular astronomical objects
Access to billions of objects in web-based astronomical catalogue
Loading tours, images and other WorldWide Telescope data files on local machine
Real-time positions of planets and moons
Move forwards and backwards in time 2000 years
View guided tours (without 3D planets)
Browsing local user collections
Virtual Observatory Cone search/registry look up and SIMBAD search
From the website:
What is WWT?
The WorldWide Telescope (WWT) is a Web 2.0 visualization software environment that enables your computer to function as a virtual telescope—bringing together imagery from the best ground and space-based telescopes in the world for a seamless exploration of the universe.
Choose from a growing number of guided tours of the sky by astronomers and educators from some of the most famous observatories and planetariums in the country. Feel free at any time to pause the tour, explore on your own (with multiple information sources for objects at your fingertips), and rejoin the tour where you left off. Join Harvard Astronomer Alyssa Goodman on a journey showing how dust in the Milky Way Galaxy condenses into stars and planets. Take a tour with University of Chicago Cosmologist Mike Gladders two billion years into the past to see a gravitational lens bending the light from galaxies allowing you to see billions more years into the past.
March 22nd, 2009 at 12:26 am
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