Want to see the same images that scientists at NASA use for their research or perform your own research with those images? Or do you want to see the Earth from the same perspective that astronauts see as they descend to Earth?
Then download the Microsoft Research’s Worldwide Telescope.
Microsoft has released its highly anticipated Worldwide Telescope software, which can be used by astronomers and non-astronomers alike to explore the heavens with a desktop client akin to Google Earth.
The WorldWide Telescope (WWT) is a 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.
You can 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.
WorldWide Telescope is created with the Microsoft® high performance Visual Experience Engine™ and allows seamless panning and zooming around the night sky, planets, and image environments. You can view the sky from multiple wavelenghts: See the x-ray view of the sky and zoom into bright radiation clouds, and then crossfade into the visible light view and discover the cloud remnants of a supernova explosion from a thousand years ago. These are huge number of different ways to reveal the hidden structures in the universe with the WorldWide Telescope. You can seamlessly pan and zoom from aerial views of the Moon and selected planets, as well as see their precise positions in the sky from any location on Earth and any time in the past or future with the Microsoft Visual Experience Engine.
All this requires blending of terabytes of images, information, and stories from multiple sources over the Internet into a seamless, immersive, rich media experience.
Microsoft Research is dedicating WorldWide Telescope to the memory of Jim Gray and is releasing WWT as a free resource to the astronomy and education communities with the hope that it will inspire and empower people to explore and understand the universe.
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