Thanks in part to a Johns Hopkins University
astrophysicist, the final frontier has gotten a bit
closer with the launch of a new Web application that allows
people to easily explore the night sky from
their computers.
WorldWide Telescope, produced by Microsoft Corp.,
brings together imagery from the best
ground- and space-based telescopes across the world,
allowing seamless panning and zooming across
the heavens. It's free at
http://www.worldwidetelescope.org.
"WorldWide Telescope allows everyone to browse through
the solar system, our galaxy and
beyond with just a few clicks of a mouse. It puts the
universe right there at your fingertips," Johns
Hopkins' Alexander Szalay said.
WorldWide Telescope was made possible in part by
Szalay's long collaboration with Microsoft's
Jim Gray on the development of large-scale,
high-performance online databases such as SkyServer
and the Sloan Digital Sky
Survey. Szalay is Alumni Centennial Professor of
Astronomy in the Henry
A. Rowland Department of Physics and Astronomy at Johns
Hopkins. Gray, a senior Microsoft manager
and database pioneer, disappeared during a 2007 boat trip
and was never found. The project has been
dedicated to him.
A blend of software and Web 2.0 services created with
the Microsoft high-performance Visual
Experience Engine, WorldWide Telescope stitches together
terabytes of high-resolution images of
celestial bodies and displays them in a way that relates to
their actual position in the sky. People can
browse at will or take advantage of guided tours of the sky
hosted by astronomers and educators at
major universities and planetariums.
But the service goes well beyond the simple browsing
of images. Users can choose which
telescope — Hubble, Chandra, Spitzer or others
— they want to look through. They can view the
locations
of planets in the night sky in the past, present or future.
They can view the universe through
different wavelengths of light to reveal hidden structures
in other parts of the galaxy. Taken as a
whole, the application provides a top-to-bottom view of the
science of astronomy.
Curtis Wong, manager of Microsoft's Next Media
Research Group, said, "WorldWide Telescope
brings to life a dream that many of us at Microsoft
Research have pursued for years, and we are
proud to release this as a free service to anyone who wants
to explore the universe. Where is Saturn
in the sky in relation to the moon? Does the Milky Way
really have a supermassive black hole in the
center of the galaxy? With [WorldWide Telescope], you can
discover the answers for yourself."
Microsoft Research has formed close ties with members
of the academic, education and
scientific communities to make WorldWide Telescope a
reality. About two dozen organizations
collaborated with Microsoft Research to supply the imagery,
provide feedback on the application from
a scientific point of view and help turn WorldWide
Telescope into a rich learning application.
Szalay, who is also a professor of computer science at
Johns Hopkins, worked with Gray of
Microsoft for nearly a decade on a variety of projects,
including SkyServer. In addition, Szalay's
group at Johns Hopkins built the multiterabyte archive for
the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (known as the
Cosmic Genome Project) and also played a major role in the
National Virtual Observatory, an alliance to
construct a system connecting all astronomy data in the
world.
GO TO