Microsoft announces May 2008 startup of WorldWide Telescope

William Atkins
Monday, 12 May 2008 18:58

Your IT - Home IT

Microsoft chairman William “Bill” Gates announces that the computer software program WorldWide Telescope will be available free to Internet users by the end of May 2008. Gates calls it "an observatory on your desktop."


WorldWide Telescope (WWT) is a tool for exploring into different parts of the Universe using data from at least ten different telescopes stationed around the world and even from one telescope orbiting about the Earth: the NASA Hubble Space Telescope.

Gates said during a speech in Jakarta, Indonesia, "This is taking data that's very complex, gathered over many years from many telescopes, and making it accessible.” [PC World: “Microsoft's Answer to Google Sky to Launch at End of May”]

As “an observatory on your desktop” [Sci-Tech Today: “Microsoft Telescope Will Bring Universe to the Desktop”], WWT allows Internet users of personal computers (PCs) to have access to terabytes of images and data in order to explore Earth and other parts of the solar system and beyond.

(One terabyte is equal to 1,000 gigabytes (one trillion bytes) of data storage capacity.) Included in the WWT package is information from around 300 million star systems.

For additional information on WorldWide Telescope, please read the iTWire article “Microsoft Shows off the WorldWide Telescope at TED2008.”

Once available to the public later in May 2008, WorldWide Telescope will allow users to use three different views to check out four different categories of objects in the Universe.

Using Microsoft’s Visual Experience Engine technologies (which allows smooth panning and zooming of objects in the night sky), the Microsoft Research program will provide images of the following four categories of objects: Earth, Panoramas, Planets, and Sky.

Sky mode provides high-quality images of outer space from data collected by the Hubble Space Telescope and ten ground-based telescopes. Earth mode provides views of the Earth, similar to Google Earth and NASA World Wind.

Planet mode allows users to see the planets Mars and Jupiter, and Earth’s Moon. The Panorama view, as the name suggests, allows users to view panoramas of parts of the Universe.

Additional information about the designers of WWT is found on the next page.