Astroblog

Wednesday, May 14, 2008

Yet another World Wide Telescope Review

Yes, I've downloaded and tried out Microsofts World Wide Telescope too. Like Stuart and DaveP, it was fairly painless to install, unlike their experience, my downloads and set-up were s-l-o-w. Painfully so. If you are in Australia on a bog-standard ADSL line, with an ordinary computer (and just using Windows 2000, not Vista), be prepared to wait a bit.

And wait.

Once it's installed and you start it up (and wait while it starts up, sheesh), it's not too bad. Basically, it's Google Sky with some extra bells and whistles. Navigation is drag and scroll just like Google Sky. Like Google Sky it's Northern Hemisphere Centric, so you initially see the sky from a Northern Hemisphere perspective. Unlike Google Sky you can observe the sky from your location.

And boy, is that screwed. World Wide Telescope shows Taurus rising in the east at my location and time (see image to the left, the blob above the eastern horizon is Pleiades), when it should be well below the western horizon. Nice one Microsoft.

At least the WWT's search function finds the Pleaides, Google' s still takes you to the Southern Pleiades. The various Hubble, infrared sky survey etc. overlays are nice, and more easily accessible than the same things in Google. The finder scope (you pull it up by right clicking) is cute, but not really that informative compared to the irritating dotty things in Google sky (one large irritating things versus lots of small irritating dotty things, meh!).

It's also got the potential to drive a telescope via and ANSCOM driver. But if you have to have the computer linked to the internet for the DSS images to work, then that is pretty limited.

Planets suck in both WWT and Google Sky. At least WWT doesn't have the weird time system that by default displays planets in the past. When you zoom in on Jupiter in WWT, the moons are in the right position for your time zone (which sort of makes up for the general planetary suckiness).

Otherwise, the program freezes at irregular intervals, the planetary tour doesn't work for me (I get the text but not the images).

So, not bad. Sluggish and requiring a grunty computer like most things Microsoft. Fun to play with, but won't be replacing SkyMap or Stellarium any time soon. (see the cool things DaveP found here and here, one of then is near the bottom left in my top image)

Labels: miscelaneous, Software

# posted by Ian Musgrave @ 11:02 pm 1 comments

Friday, August 24, 2007

Google Sky - The Problem with Planets

Google Sky has a bit of a problem with planetary positions.

Google Earth has been quite useful to the astronomically inclined. You can tour great telescopes, locate known meteor falls, find previously unknown impact craters and set up occultation visibility maps. Now Google Earth has been updated to include sky maps. You can download the new sky-enabled version here, findout out the basics here, and get some cool KML tour files here.

Google Sky won't replace SkyMap, or Sky View Cafe, or any of those specialist sky viwing programs, but as DaveP says, that's not the point.
DaveP very rightly points out that the strength of Google is in mashing together data streams. DaveP goes into some detail on this, so check it out, then start making mash-ups.

Of course, there are bugs. DaveP reports one bug, some layer lables appear in the sky. With him ot was wis picture lables. With me it's the lables from the influenza epidemilogy mash up. Denpasaar floast mysteiously mot far from Ursa Major. This is a relatively minor issue

More serious is the fact that the planets are way out of position. You have to turn on the layers to see the planets in the first place. As you can see from the image above, Mars is well out of position, and Mercury is placed in Gemini, when it should be in Leo! This is because the program seems to default to 21 July when putting up the planets, unless you notice the time slider at the top, and move it to your current date, it will show you the planets as of July.

I'd also like to the stars as seen from the southern hemisphere have a southern hemipshere orientation, but that is a minor issue.

Labels: Google Earth, Software