WorldWide Telescope - Some interesting feature tips to begin with !

By now you must have already installed and enjoying the awesome experience of Microsoft WorldWide Telescope (WWT). If not download Now to try it. Here are some of the interesting features tips as you start using it.

- You can use WWT for 4 different Looks: Panorama, Sky, Earth, or Planets.  Default is looking into the Sky, You can view planets of the Solar System in 3D or view a panoramic shot Or you can also use WWT to browse the Earth using Virtual Earth.  This option is available at bottom left corner. 

- You can change your Observing Location to your local place or city. By default, WWT is configured to view the night sky as if you were  at Microsoft Building 99 in Redmond.  This can be changed from 'View' option.A Long list of cities - country wise is provided, there are 72 Indian cities in the list. A very comprehensive list arranged according to States is provided for United States and Canada.

 

 

- WWT observes the night sky in real-time.I think this is what is required for star gazing. However, it also provides controls that let you move backward or forward as well as pausing at any given moment. You can see the local time or in UTC.

- You can also connect ASCOM capable Real Telescopes to your PC using WWT to watch the night sky.

- Suppose you are exploring and find something very interesting and you want it to be put as Wallpaper, WWT also lets you copy the view to your clipboard. First make the image view perfect by adjusting the 'Image Quality' slider from 'settings'. And also you can check the 'Auto Hide Tabs' and 'Auto Hide Contexts' to get the full view for your desktop. Also remove any 'crosshairs', 'boundaries' ,'Figures' by unchecking these options to remove any artificial lines from 'view' tab. Now once the view is perfect , select 'Copy current view to clipboard' from the view and paste it into application like paint and save it for putting it as Wallpaper.

  

Also there are few images of high resolution provided as download on the WWT site under the 'Press' tab.

- You can Right-click the object to display the Finder Scope. With the Finder Scope, you can refine your search in the Field of View, or research your selected object from various databases or Wikipedia site.

- For users of the telescope, there are rich media tours to that offer narration, music, text, and graphics to guide you through the night sky. It's like going to the planetarium without leaving your home! You can also make your own tours to share with others - a feature that teachers will really enjoy.

- There are large number of collections from which you can add items to create your own collection and then that collection can be run as slide show.

For both scientists and educators, the WorldWide Telescope will help to teach astronomy, computational science, and even provide opportunities for scientific discovery.

- WWT keeps the tours, imagery you view in data cache so that these can be viewed even if you are not connected to net.Anytime you can purge the cache to free the space.

- There's a Getting Started (help) is there if any help is needed.

Apart from these , there are many many more features, you have to explore them.

Some of the things taken from Help :

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.

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.

The WorldWide Telescope (WWT) is a software environment that enables your computer to function as a virtual telescope—bringing together imagery from the best ground and space telescopes for a seamless exploration of the universe.

If you have not yet tried WWT, you should try it now and enjoy the great experience. You don't have to be an astronomer to enjoy. You can just imagine and watch how terabytes of data, images etc. are seamlessly blended to give that experience. You start using it, and  who knows you may even discover something in the vast universe.

WorldWide Telescope Public Beta released

Microsoft launched the public beta of its WorldWide Telescope, which is now available at http://www.worldwidetelescope.org. During its demo it was much talked about and everyone was eagerly waiting for it.

“The WorldWide Telescope is a powerful tool for science and education that makes it possible for everyone to explore the universe,” said Bill Gates, chairman of Microsoft. “By combining terabytes of incredible imagery and data with easy-to-use software for viewing and moving through all that information, the WorldWide Telescope opens the door to new ways to see and experience the wonders of space. Our hope is that it will inspire young people to explore astronomy and science, and help researchers in their quest to better understand the universe.”

Want to see the same images that scientists at NASA use for their research or perform your own research with those images? Or do you want to see the Earth from the same perspective that astronauts see as they descend to Earth? How about taking a 5 minute break and viewing a panorama of a different city? Install WWT and start your explorations.

Download NOW !!

Check the press release

Microsoft WorldWide Telescope ?

It has created a buzz in the Blog space when last week Robert Scoble posted "Microsoft researchers make me cry" after he had an opportunity to see a demo of a new Microsoft project.

He says, "Curtis Wong and Jonathan Fay, researchers at Microsoft, fired up their machines and showed me something that I can’t tell you about until February 27th. It’s too inspiring to stay a secret for long. While watching the demo I realized the way I look at the world was about to change. While listening to Wong I noticed a tear running down my face. It’s been a long while since Microsoft did something that had an emotional impact on me like that."

After that everyone was speculating what could be that project. Many of these speculations point towards WorldWide Telescope and say it'll be launched on Feb. 27th at the TED Conference. The service will be accessed through a downloadable application and will be only for Windows at present. All these are just Speculations, but interestingly pointing towards a an exciting application.

I was not knowing about this Microsoft Research Project, WorldWide Telescope (WWT). Earlier Jonathan Fay gave presentations called "The WorldWide Telescope, bringing the Universe to a PC near you” and "How you can use the WorldWide Telescope" last year. Which says:

"The WorldWide Telescope (WWT) project is designed to be an extensible learning and exploration environment which integrates hyperlinked rich media narrative with a seamless multiple survey virtual sky to enable guided and unguided exploration of the universe. WWT is a collaboration between Next Media Research (Principal Researcher and group manager Curtis Wong, Principal Research Software Design Engineer Jonathan Fay and Jina Suh Research Intern), Alex Szalay at Johns Hopkins University, Alyssa Goodman at Harvard's Center for Astrophysics, and Frank Summers at Space Telescope Science Institute. "

"Curtis worked closely with Jim Gray and Alex Szalay in 2002 to develop the SkyServer Website to facilitate public access to the images and data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. SkyServer was always conceived of as the foundation towards building the World Wide Telescope."

"The WorldWide Telescope project will open up astronomy education and exploration like never before. You can use the WorldWide telescope to explore, create and share educational narratives and even register your own astronomical images so they can be viewed in the context of the virtual sky..."

Yes it'll be too exciting and fascinating to see such an application right on your PC. I have glanced at software like Stellarium but WWT may be much better. It will be handling huge amount of data. It'll create more interest in the area of Astronomy to explore.

There's also an article on WWT in the Apr.2006 edition of MSDN Mag, which says :

"Astronomy obeys Moore's law: it is producing about two times more data each year. Current instruments typically produce nearly a terabyte per night. Managing huge data archives and processing complex data are now among the major astronomy challenges."

"...We built an online catalog of the SDSS data as a Web-accessible database, along with visual tools to analyze the data (SkyServer.sdss.org). The result is a SQL Server^™ database with approximately 14 billion rows. It gives full GUI and SQL access to the SDSS data. Now everyone can use one of the world's best telescopes. "

You can also check Sloan Digital Sky Survey / SkyServer

So by releasing WWT, Microsoft will also be displaying its prowess in handling such huge databases.

I can not say about what is that Microsoft Project to be unveiled on 27th Feb. but if it is WWT, it'll really be exciting. For that matter any project where everyone is so curious about is exciting.

And I think it may be WWT only, if not on that day but in the future Microsoft is going to release WWT, because Bill Gates has spoken about role of Software Astronomy twice very recently.

Once while talking to Max on Channel8 on launch of DreamSpark (Bill Gates talks about Free Software, Students, and Technology) talks of it. And again yesterday on his College tour of Stanford University (Bill Gates Stanford Speech) mentions and says:

" ...Today, the amount of data in most of these sciences is large enough that we can say that computer software and databases and pattern matching that come out of software breakthroughs are really important for what is going on in the sciences, particularly in biology, but I'd say almost as strongly for astronomy where the amount of data and taking a theory about the density of things, the creation of things, it's not just one telescope, it's not just being there at midnight and seeing something cool and writing it up and getting the Nobel Prize; rather it's deep analysis across massive amounts of data.

So, we are sort of the handmaiden of those advances, and making sure that we're reaching out and collaborating with the sciences, and understanding from them how do they want to process that genomic data, how do they want to take and get insights into it, that's very important..."