Astroblog: Microsoft's World Wide Telescope is almost here.

Monday, March 03, 2008

Microsoft's World Wide Telescope is almost here.

Microsoft have apparently been developing a virtual sky program akin to Google Sky, the World Wide Telescope. As you can see, the site isn't live yet. If you wait long enough the site plays a cute video, but there is not much useful information.Apparently it will be free though.. Whether it will work with Firefox, or only in Internet Explorer is not known. An article about the program is here. (Hat tip to Dave Herald)

Labels: Astronomy

# posted by Ian Musgrave @ 7:22 am

Comments:

Ian, I think this is meant to be a desktop rather than a browser application. I'm guessing that coming from Microsoft it will only work on Windows. The TED talk video gives a bit more of an idea of it rather than just cute kids reacting to something we can't see. It looks as though they will be making a fairly pretty looking app that includes some multi-wavelength images from various space telescopes. I was impressed at one point when I noticed that they had included a VLA image of the centre of the galaxy.

# posted by

Anonymous : 8:06 am

Thanks Stuart. It was very unclear from the Microsoft site exactly what was going on. That clears things up a lot. Sounds like it could be good (but it is Microsoft, they may find some way to muck things up).

# posted by