An Observatory In Every Computer As Virtual Telescope Turns To The Heavens
The Age
Thursday May 29, 2008
A free program launched recently 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 (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 leading space scientists and educators, including Dr Roy Gould, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics."Galileo's telescope started to give us views of the universe that no one else had seen before and we started asking what was out there and why," he said. "I think the WorldWide Telescope is going to do the same thing for the rest of us."The program works in the same way as many online mapping tools, allowing users to zoom around on an interactive canvas combining images and data drawn from the world's leading astronomical research organisations.At its launch, the WWT has access to 12 terabytes of data - enough to fill the equivalent of 1.2 million books.But like the universe, this will expand as new images are added.Dr Gould believes the WWT will give amateur astronomers and even complete novices an opportunity to help the scientific community in their research. "This is going to change our relationship with the night sky in a significant way," he said.WWT is being offered as an educational tool and was created to honour the memory of the late Dr Jim Gray, a leading Microsoft computer scientist who died last year.It was Dr Gray's belief that the vast amount of space data being collected meant that astronomy would change from being an observational science into a computational one, said Dr Curtis Wong, a leading Microsoft research scientist and the head of the WWT project.With the growth of the internet and the increasing grunt of even the most modest home computer, Dr Gray could see the day coming when the internet would have the capacity to become the platform for a worldwide virtual observatory that anyone could use.A key feature of the program is the ability of any user to create rich media tours to showcase features found in the universe.For instance, one of the tours takes you across the Martian landscape using images captured in the Mars Rover program."For millennia people have looked up to the skies and not only wondered but created stories - and every different culture has their own story about the heavens," Dr Wong said."The WorldWide Telescope is an opportunity for people to create and share those stories."The Microsoft project is being launched almost nine months after Google rolled out its Google Sky service, a layered map of astronomical images that is part of its Google Earth program.But there is no sense of a space race between the two giants of the technology world. Both projects are public service tools without commercial application.Dr Wong would not be drawn on making comparisons between the two, although it has been previously reported that the WWT packs in much more data and imagery than its Google counterpart. -- STEPHEN HUTCHEON
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