Microsoft’s Worldwide Telescope looks at space

Microsoft has made a beta version of its Worldwide Telescope application publicly available. The project uses images from ground-based and space telescopes.

By using the so-called ‘Visual Experience Engine’, the company has succeeded in smoothly merging the images from telescopes. The beta requires a Download of over 21MB and is suitable for PCs running XP with SP2 or Vista. The system requirements for Mac systems are largely the same as for the PC, but you need to run Bootcamp and boot to Windows. To increase the speed of browsing through what Microsoft claims is terabytes of data from telescopes, the company recommends reserving 10GB of disk space.

The Worldwide Telescope comes from the Microsoft Research labs and uses images from telescopes such as the Hubble Space Telescope, the Chandra X-Ray Observatory Center and the Spitzer Space Telescope. It is also possible to view the universe in spectra other than usual: for example, constellations can also be viewed in X-ray or infrared view. The project was realized in collaboration with NASA, among others, and is intended to give not only consumers, but also astronomers and other researchers access to the universe. The resolution of the images used is roughly comparable to that of the material Google uses for its sky alternative.