DC4MS

This is an absolutely amazing website.

-------------------

Microsoft has formally launched its Worldwide Telescope project, an online collection of images from deep space that represent Redmond's answer to Google Sky.

"The WorldWide telescope is a powerful tool for science and education that makes it possible for everyone to explore the universe," said Microsoft chairman Bill Gates, in a statement Tuesday. The project provides "a rich visualization environment that functions as a virtual telescope," according to the WorldWide Telescope Web site.

The online service combines terabytes of celestial images and other data that users can pan across using a viewer that employs Microsoft's Visual Experience Engine. WorldWide Telescope also includes interactive links to audio and video presentations that offer more information about the part of space that the user is viewing.

The service is free, and is dedicated to the memory of Microsoft researcher Jim Gray, who went missing at sea last year. Microsoft says much of the technology in WorldWide Telescope is built on Gray's original SkyServer project.

WorldWide Telescope is similar to Google Sky, a service that the search engine giant added to its Google Earth site in August. Google has partnered with the Space Telescope Scientist Institute and the Hubble Space Telescope on the project. WorldWide Telescope also uses data from the Hubble telescope.

With the launch of WorldWide Telescope, Microsoft will extend its battle for Internet dominance with Google to the cosmos. The two companies in recent years have been matching each other service for service in an effort to establish themselves as the Web's premier software platform.

Google launched Google Apps in 2006 with an eye to breaking Microsoft's stranglehold on the desktop applications market. The consumer version of the service offers free word processing, spreadsheet and presentation tools.

Microsoft has countered with a strategy called software-plus-services, under which it's moving parts of its application portfolio to the Web.

DC4MS

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.

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. View the sky from multiple wavelengths: 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. Switch to the Hydrogen Alpha view to see the distribution and illumination of massive primordial hydrogen cloud structures lit up by the high energy radiation coming from nearby stars in the Milky Way. These are just two of many different ways to reveal the hidden structures in the universe with the WorldWide Telescope. 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.

WWT is a single rich application portal that blends terabytes of images, information, and stories from multiple sources over the Internet into a seamless, immersive, rich media experience. Kids of all ages will feel empowered to explore and understand the universe with its simple and powerful user interface.

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 like never before.

How do you start exploring? Click the top of the Guided Tours tab and then click the Welcome thumbnail to watch a guided tour showing you how to navigate in WWT. Or click a link to read more: WWT in Depth