WorldWide Telescope

Publisher's description of WorldWide Telescope

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.

WorldWide Telescope is created with the Microsoft Visual Experience Engine and allows seamless panning and zooming around the night sky, planets, and image environments. 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. 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.

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. You can also create your own tours with music and voiceovers.

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Editor's review of WorldWide Telescope

WorldWide Telescope is free software from Microsoft that lets users explore the universe with impressive content from the Hubble Space Telescope, NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, the Chandra X-Ray Observatory Center, and other famed ground- and space-based telescopes. Colorful nebulae, distant galaxies, black holes, and radiation clouds are all accessible from your desktop with a few clicks.

The main WorldWide Telescope interface includes seven tabs for navigating: Explore, Guided Tours, Search, Community, Telescope, View, and Settings. Some of the tabs, such as Explore and Search, include collapsible submenus with further options at the bottom of the interface. The bulk of the screen is devoted to displaying detailed images of objects throughout the universe.

You can move around the sky by clicking with your left mouse and dragging the screen. There are multiple mouse and keyboard commands for rotating and tilting the view, and zooming in and out. Right-click on any object to learn more about it. You can save your favorite places in the universe to visit them later under "My Collections," and you can watch guided tours of the universe conducted by experts and users. You can also add text, images, and shapes to enhance your tour, and you can even layer a soundtrack and voice over.

There are a few niggling bugs--zooming with the mouse wheel is inaccurate, canceling the download of a guided tour crashes the program, and the help content is hidden underneath the Explore drop-down menu. However, the software boasts a hoard of amazing telescope imagery to be explored as well as very cool features that let you view, save, and manage that imagery in many different ways. WorldWide Telescope appears to be an invaluable tool for hobbyists, astronomers, students, educators, or anyone curious about the universe.

User reviews of WorldWide Telescope

• Average user rating: out of 101 votes
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  WorldWide Telescope

  Seriously Cool

  by: andeyejah on 13-May-2008 01:42:29 PM

  Pros: Great images and endless top notch info.I highly reccomend it if you love space.100 percent better than googles meager offering!.

  Cons: having to download drivers for telescope is annoying.

  Was this review helpful? Yes | No (12 of 13 users said yes)

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  WorldWide Telescope

  Wow! Absolutely Incredible!!

  by: lordmachiavelli on 14-May-2008 04:48:48 AM

  Pros: I hate Microsoft, and I still give it 5 stars! The last good product MS ever put out was their serial mouse driver in 1988 or so; until now that is.

  Cons: It did crash, but I went into advanced settings and tried to manually purge the tour cache. But hey, I'm running XP/sp3, and it's the first release of WWT.

  Wishlist:

  There are many image databases to choose from, across the entire spectrum. I would like to see one spectrum line across the screen (like a widget or so), with a slider that snaps to the appropriate database. I mean, what average person knows the difference between Q and V microwave band? :)

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  WorldWide Telescope

  good

  by: saleh_duwahi on 28-May-2008 05:24:22 AM

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  WorldWide Telescope

  For a beta release, this is really good

  by: Fred Brychta on 21-May-2008 12:16:54 PM

  Pros: A great way to see a lot of astro-physical pictures with great resolution & excellent color rendition.

  Was this review helpful? Yes | No (1 of 2 users said yes)

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  WorldWide Telescope

  The Download Restarted My Computer, Twice

  by: SENSUAL24 on 21-May-2008 08:05:12 PM

  Cons: I tried to download it and it cuased my computer to restart, I thought it might have been something else that caused it, but then I tried it again and the same thing happened, and both times it was the only download I was running, I should know better than to deal with Microsoft downloads.

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