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Explore the Skies with WorldWide Telescope

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Since my childhood days I have looked up in the sky searching the skies for the planets, comets and constellations. Without any aid the best that I could do was to identify Ursa Major (aka Saptarshi in India) and Orion. But now these are things of the past. With the WorldWide Telescope (a rich visualization environment created with Microsoft Corp.’s high-performance Visual Experience Engine) I can not only find out where my favorite constellations are but also start exploring the depths of the Universe using images from some of the best ground- and space-based telescopes.

WorldWide Telescope enables seamless panning and zooming around the night sky, planets and image environments. One select their city as the default sky view and WorldWide Telescope will show you exactly how the sky would look to you from that city. The WorldWide Telescope allows a user to see the precise position of the moon and selected planets in the sky from any location on Earth, at any time in the past or future. I was able to combine the above two features to set the WorldWide Telescope to my birth place and to go back in time and see the sky at the time of my birth and understand the logic behind the zodiac signs. With its Guided Tours option users can create their own tours and share them with others. Slide-based tours are similar to a PowerPoint slideshow. So the next time you are teaching students/kids about the sky and planets you can give the students a project to create a guided tour and make learning much more fun for the students. Check out more features of the WWT at https://www.worldwidetelescope.org/press/press.aspx.

Space explorers of all ages will feel empowered to navigate and understand the universe with the WorldWide Telescope’s simple yet powerful user interface.

"The WorldWide Telescope takes the best images from the greatest telescopes on Earth ... and in space ... and assembles them into a seamless, holistic view of the universe. 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," said astronomer Dr. Roy Gould of the Harvard Center for Astrophysics as he introduced the World Wide Telescope in partnership with Curtis Wong, principal researcher of Microsoft’s Next Media Research group and head of the project.Watch their amazing video presentation at this year's TED conference, and get a guided tour by Curtis Wong at Microsoft TechFest 2008 - TED Talks Roy Gould, Curtis Wong- WorldWide Telescope (video).

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