Twirling galaxies, exotic
nebulae and exploding stars are now just a mouse click away for
amateur astronomers.
Microsoft has launched WorldWide Telescope, a free tool that
stitches together images from some of the best ground- and
space-based telescopes.
Collections include
pictures from the Hubble and Spitzer telescopes, as well as the
Chandra X-Ray Observatory.
The web-based tool also allows users to pan and zoom around the
planets, and trace their locations in the night sky.
"Users can see the X-ray view of the sky, zoom into bright
radiation clouds, and then cross-fade into the visible light
view and discover the cloud remnants of a supernova explosion
from a thousand years ago," explained Roy Gould, a researcher at
the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
"[It's] a beautiful platform for explaining and getting people
excited about astronomy, and I think the professional
astronomers will come to use it as well," said Roy Williams of
the California Institute of Technology
Detailed view
To use the new system, users need to download WorldWide
Telescope from the web. It only runs on Windows operating
systems.
The web portal gives star-gazers access to "terabytes" of data.
It allows them to explore planets, moons and other celestial
objects and track their precise position in the sky from any
location on Earth, "at any time in the past or future".
Data from sources including the US space agency Nasa allows
users to switch between views at different wavelengths and
through different telescopes.
Nasa contributed imagery from its Mars Rovers, the Hubble Space
Telescope, the Spitzer Space Telescope and the Chandra X-ray
Observatory.
Around 30
images from Chandra are available through the
program including X-ray data and
multi-wavelength composite photographs.
Other data sets include the ongoing Sloan
Digital Sky Survey, also known as the Cosmic
Genome Project, which aims to capture detailed
optical images of more than a quarter of the
night sky.
WorldWide Telescope, launched as a beta, or test
version, also features tours of the Universe by
leading astronomers, as well as the ability for
a user to record their own.
A tour called Dust and Us by Alyssa Goodman,
professor of astronomy at Harvard, walks through
the dark regions in galaxies where stars and
planets form.
"I see the WorldWide Telescope
as having an important educational mission," said Robert Kirshner,
professor of astronomy at Harvard University.
"[It] gives somebody a kind of freedom to follow their imagination."
Bill Gates, Microsoft's chairman, described it as a "powerful tool
for education" and said he hoped it would "inspire young people to
explore astronomy and science".
Stellar options
Microsoft's new application is not the only tool that allows
astronomers to explore the night sky from their computers.
Last year, Microsoft rival Google launched Sky, an add-on to Google
Earth which allows astronomers to glide through images of more than
one million stars and 200 million galaxies.
Optional layers allow users to explore images from the Hubble Space
Telescope as well as animations of lunar cycles.
Other applications have been available for longer.
For example, Stellarium is a free open source tool that gives people
a chance to access more than 210 million stars, in addition to
planets and moons.
The project was launched in 2001 by Fabien Chereau, a Research
Engineer at the Paris Astronomical Observatory, and is used in many
planetariums.
Like WorldWide Telescope the software allows users to record and
play their own tours of the Universe.
Click Here for
official website and Download the software
BBC News
