Space, the final frontier, has been brought closer to home. The WorldWide Telescope (WWT), developed by Microsoft and launched to the public this month, is a free Web application that allows students and the generally curious to explore strange new worlds through their personal computers.
US space agency Nasa and various technological, scientific and academic communities worked with Microsoft Research, a unit of the software company and one of the world's top research operations, to provide the imagery and feedback on the application. WWT stitches together hundreds of terabytes of data from multiple sources - Nasa provides images from its Hubble Space Telescope, Spitzer Space Telescope and Chandra X-ray Observatory, for example - and presents it in a form that blurs the gap between cutting-edge research, education and public knowledge. (A terabyte is equivalent to 1,000 gigabytes.)
High-resolution images of celestial bodies are displayed in a way that relates to their position in the sky and enables swift panning and zooming around the heavens on a user's desktop. Users can choose which telescope they want to look through, including ground-based telescopes such as that of Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles, in the US. Microsoft Research has not yet tapped some major observatories, such as those on the mainland, to contribute to WWT's resource base.
'Where is Saturn in the sky in relation to the moon? Does the Milky Way really have a super-massive black hole in the centre of the galaxy? With the universe at your fingertips, you can discover the answers for yourself,' says Curtis Wong, manager of Microsoft's Next Media Research Group and co-designer of WWT.
WWT's Finder Scope makes it easy to identify and research the objects the user is viewing by opening relevant data and image resources, including those from the Simbad - which stands for 'set of identifications, measurements and bibliography for astronomical data' - database, Nasa, Wikipedia and other pertinent sites on the internet. But the application goes well beyond the simple browsing of images. Users can view the locations of planets in the night sky - in the past, present or future. They can view the universe through different wavelengths of light to reveal hidden structures in other parts of the galaxy.
