NightBlogger

Photo Ethan Hein

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.

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. 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. Click here to go to site

FastCompanyTV
“This is the most innovative thing I’ve seen Microsoft do in years. It had a huge emotional impact on me, as I realized the way my son will see the Universe will forever change, thanks to the work of two guys in Microsoft Research (Curtis Wong and Jonathan Fay). We meet both of them and get a look at why the WorldWide Telescope created a stir at last week’s TED Conference. Coming soon, you’ll get another look inside Microsoft Research as we get a tour of the new building that the researchers themselves help design. Tons of innovative ideas there that you’ll appreciate learning from.”