From Microsoft:

The WorldWide Telescope (WWT) is a Web 2.0 visualization software environment that enables your computer to function as a virtual telescope, bringing together imagery from the best ground and space-based telescopes in the world for a seamless exploration of the universe.

WorldWide Telescope is created with the Microsoft Visual Experience Engine and allows seamless panning and zooming around the night sky, planets, and image environments. View the sky from multiple wavelenghts: 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.

Choose from 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. You can also create your own tours with music and voiceovers.

Review

I just finished trying out the Microsoft WorldWide telescope and it just simply blows your mind away. It simply takes interactive applications to a new level. The service, which opened to the public on May 13, lets people explore the cosmos through any computer with an Internet connection.

WorldWide Telescope is a desktop application for Windows which does exactly what you would think. It essentially turns your computer into a telescope. You can choose from a variety of options from roaming the universe freely, to guided tours of various celestial features. You can join communities of stargazers and also connect your own telescope to your computer and control it with this application. Reminds me more of the iLabs project where universities gave remote control of expensive laboratory experiments to people across the world. Another option is to change your source of imagery to gain a different perspective.

This application really shines in the guided tours which let you sit back and observe while the application zooms and pans around the stars with someone narrating in the background. The narrators range from an 8 year old boy talking about The Ring Nebula to a Harvard astrophysicist talking about dust.

The software has images from a lot of telescopes. It combines about 12 terabytes of data, including 50 surveys and 1, 000 high-resolution studies, with links to astronomy research on sites around the Web. It blends the data with regularly updated photos captured by high-powered telescopes on and off the Earth, including the Hubble Space Telescope, circling the planet 353 miles up, and the Cerro Tololo Observatory, 312 miles north of Santiago, Chile, in the foothills of the Andes. Put it all together, and the WWT knits together a spellbinding panorama of the night sky.

For amateur astronomers, its a dream come true. The software provides bookmarks to places worth seeing and the best part is the guided tours which do a very good job with the resources at hand.

The software is also a fantastic tool for all teachers and schools who are looking for a really great way of explaining the wonders of deep space. The tours are a really innovative feature as its always fascinating to watch and learn than to just browse around aimlessly not knowing what you are looking at. For scientists, astronomers, academicians, schools , universities, the worldwide telescope is a genuine research tool that they will likely return to again and again.

WorldWide Telescope is an extremely feature packed and complex piece of software. The complexity of this application might turn some off because it certainly seems to be overwhelming at first. I'm glad that Microsoft decided to keep this wealth of features and options in the application, despite the potential usability problems. Having so many different controls really gives people the ability to delve deeper into specific areas of interest.

There are some similar services available now, including Google Sky. But what sets Worldwide Telescope apart is how easy it is to navigate the service and dig into more information about planets, stars, and galaxies. Sweep your mouse sideways, and you're spinning across the galaxy. Move the mouse forward, and you hurtle into the picture. You can close in on the Sombrero Galaxy or a black hole in Galaxy NGC 4261 and find yourself immersed in startling details and whirling brilliant hues.

Once you find an interesting object, you can uncover a wealth of additional information. A mouse click brings up links from outside sources, including NASA, Wikipedia, and Europe's SIMBAD Astronomical Database. One link on the group of galaxies known as Stephen's Quintet explains how the galaxies are colliding with each other and ripping stars away from one another.

The imagery in WorldWide Telescope is absolutely breathtaking and it's a truly unique feeling to fly around in space and take a look at what's around us. I have only scratched the surface of what this application is capable of and I'm already impressed. There is a whole lot to see here and the volume and quality of content and guided tours will only improve as time goes on.

The service also allows you to look at different approaches to studying the universe, whether by studying cosmic dust or microwaves. That provides people with a broader understanding of astronomy research. And people can even sign up to get feeds from specific telescopes around the world or in space.

WWT is expected to add more features than Google Sky has now. For instance, researchers can add their own data to Google Sky and use application programming interfaces (APIs) to put models of their data on their own sites. Expect to that and more added to the Worldwide Telescope in the future.

Go get the WorldWide Telescope now!