Microsofts Worldwide telescope

[kiwi_2005]

A free program from Microsoft will effectively turn every computer that downloads it into a mini-planetarium capable of displaying high resolution images of millions of stars, planets and other celestial bodies.
The project, called the WorldWide Telescope (http://www.worldwidetelescope.org/) (WWT), is the result of several years of hard labour by a small team at Microsoft Research, the software company's key R&D centre.
It has drawn lavish praise from some of the world's leading space scientists and educators, including Dr Roy Gould of the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics.



The WWT comes as a 20MB download and is available from the WorldWide Telescope site (http://www.worldwidetelescope.org/). The program only works on the Windows operating system

http://www.worldwidetelescope.org/

[Sailor Steve]

:o WOW! What a cool thing!

Thanks!:sunny:

[Jimbuna]

That is one piece of kit my son and I will be downloading tonight :rock:

Thanks for the heads up :up:

[SUBMAN1]

Already posted this yesterday:

http://www.subsim.com/radioroom/showthread.php?t=136724

-S

[jpm1]

i've just discovered that tonight it seems nice

[Blacklight]

There's also Celestia which is open source, has THOUSANDS of addons and is pretty much the same thing. And you can take pretty pics with it too.

http://celestia.sourceforge.net/

It's been around for YEARS and it's pretty darn good.

It's a lot of people's dream to get Celestia and Orbiter combined somehow.

[Iceman]

Is it real time with acces to actual telescopes or just a sim like Celestia?....I have Celestia and like it...haven't updated in a while but also have an older version of Starry Night which I like to view the sky from my pov...

[Blacklight]

It's a telescope sim like Celestia. It looks like they tacked on some extra features like adding different false color spectrums to your viewing. It looks interesting. It'll be neat to see how Celestia stacks up against it.
I know I'm probably going to have to stick to Celestia. My computer is the absolute bare minimum setup to run it so it would probably run like crap. It amazes me how fast this computer went out of date. :D

[SUBMAN1]

Celestia and WWT are two different programs. Celestia is a 3D model of the universe and WWT is a series of images from actual telescopes ala NASA's World Wind.

WWT doesn't take you to a 3D location like Celestia, but zooms in on actual telescope imagery. I have both.

-S

PS. In case you don't know what World Wind is - http://worldwind.arc.nasa.gov/