WorldWide Telescope 2.2

WorldWide Telescope 2.2 is a program changing computer into a virtual telescope, which gives users images from the best ground and space-based telescopes in the world for a exploring the universe.

You can select 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. Join Harvard Astronomer Alyssa Goodman on a journey showing how dust in the Milky Way Galaxy condenses into stars and planets. Take a tour with University of Chicago Cosmologist Mike Gladders two billion years into the past to see a gravitational lens bending the light from galaxies allowing you to see billions more years into the past.

WorldWide Telescope is created with the Microsoft® high performance Visual Experience Engine™ and allows seamless panning and zooming around the night sky, planets, and image environments. View the sky from multiple wavelengths: 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. Seamlessly pan and zoom from aerial views of the Moon and selected planets, as well as see their precise positions in the sky from any location on Earth and any time in the past or future with the Microsoft Visual Experience Engine.

WWT is a single rich application portal that blends terabytes of images, information, and stories from multiple sources over the Internet into a seamless, immersive, rich media experience. Kids of all ages will feel empowered to explore and understand the universe with its simple and powerful user interface. WWT is a free resource to the astronomy and education communities, which will inspire and empower people to explore and understand the universe like never before. 

Major Features:

1. WWT offers access to various temporal and multi-spectral studies astronomic data and literature to anyone with an Internet connection.
2. The WorldWide Telescope (WWT) is a step toward the "democratization" of the conduct of science. The Internet will become, as astronomers put it, "the world´s best telescope"--a supercomputer at your desktop.
3. The mission of the WWT is twofold:
   • To aggregate scientific data from major telescopes, observatories and institutions and make temporal and multi-spectral studies available through a single cohesive Internet–based portal.
   • To re-awaken the interest for science in the younger generations through astronomy and new technologies through the virtual observatory of the WWT. This also provides a wonderful base for teaching astronomy, scientific discovery, and computational science.
4. By enabling comparison of data from diverse sources: space and ground, and radio, optical, infrared, and other wavelengths, WWT provides a single Internet-based portal to this unprecedented catalog of data to study the evolving universe.
   
5. By connecting to the same source materials that scientists at NASA and Caltech are using for their research, WWT is a powerful “virtual observatory” for scientists, educators, and the public. Researching the sky as easy as viewing a Web site and is accessible to everyone with an Internet connection.
6. WWT also contains features to help you explore the Earth, satellites, such as the Moon, and 360 degree panoramas of Yosemite’s Half Dome and other locations.

WareSeeker Editor