Sneak Peek at Microsoft's WorldWide Telescope

Ted.com has a great sneak peek at Microsoft's new WorldWide Telescope project. In this video, presented by Roy Gould and Curtis Wong, you are able to see a combined view of satellites and telescopes from all over the planet and nearby space. The compiled image is rendered using Microsoft's new high-performance "Visual Experience Engine" that allows users to pan and zoom across the night sky seamlessly.

Re:Question:

[rindeee]

From Wikipedia's entry on Google Sky (which sites two articles on the matter): Google Sky is believed to be less expansive than its competitor WorldWide Telescope from Microsoft, which is regarded as significantly better.

Looks bit like Celestia (also free, Win/App/Lin)

[Muphry]

Looks a lot like the also free Celestia:

http://www.shatters.net/celestia/ [shatters.net]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celestia [wikipedia.org]

Re:Question:

[MickDownUnder]

I believe it's using the Photosynth engine [ted.com]. I think the beauty of photosynth is that it is a self organising system for seamlessly navigating between photographs that gives you the illusion of animation. Microsoft's system can crawl web pages for material to add to the collage. So it does seem to be better" [channelregister.co.uk] than google sky as this system will be allowed continue to collect images published in astronomical papers and add these pages to the world wide telescope system.

Make no mistake about it Photosynth is a world changing technology.

Re:Question:

[Beale]

Or, you know, you could use Celestia.

A little about the WWT

[gsn]

I've been very lucky to see this project from alpha to present because one of friends interned with the group and introduced me to them - its gone through some amazing development - I remember seeing this I think early 2007 - it looked more like Stellarium than anything else but just plane black with solid circles for stars and galaxies. It took forever to load images when you zoomed in. Must have crashed about 30 times in a five minute demo.

Jonathan Fay (of MaximDL fame) showed it off at Table Mountain Star Party last year and they'd moved from that sky to a synthetic pre-rendered sky that would transition to real images from Hubble or other sources as you zoomed in.

Saw it again at the American Astronomical Society Meeting this January in Austin and really got to play with it since they were right alongside the Harvard IIC booth. It was the first time they were using real imagery for the entire sky and it looked amazing and Jonathan was touting the tour facility.

Its biggest trick in my mind though you didn't see in the video - one little slider that takes you from the Optical to the Infrared and Microwave and X-Ray sky. Simply blew me away.

It already supports VOTable and FITS images and dozens of other formats that astronomers use and are becoming standards for enthusiastic hobbyists. You can take your own images and put them up on the same sky as data from Chandra or Swift or the best ground based data from MMT or Magellan or Keck. Now it starts to get really useful. The CfA at Harvard has been digitizing its old plates of sky images, Pan-STARRS will start operating sooner rather than later, SDSS has a ton of data already and LSST will be up in a few years imaging the entire sky every few nights. This is a monstrous amount of data and the system really gives you a way to search through it all very intuitively. I'd love the ability to click on a star in the sky and have all known spectra of it pop up along with references. Not quite there yet but it will be.

This also makes it the best educational tool. There are projects like Las Cumbres and several schools and colleges have access to telescopes so this gives you a great tool with which to look at data and take your own data and do it in a way that doesn't require you learning how to use NED and SIMBAD and looking for papers on ADS. But I think the biggest thing it does is just blow you away with a sense of how large everything is, or perhaps how small you are in relation and I think that is a very powerful idea. I remember the first time I saw the Eames Power of Ten video - this takes that to a different level and is genuinely thought provoking.

Quite simply the best thing I've ever seen out of Microsoft.

Not true...

[Anonymous Coward]

...kindly RTFA: it consists of actual imagery, not a model of the imagery like Celestia... (karma whoring: off)

Jim Gray gone missing

[LS]

On a related note, Jim Gray [microsoft.com], the researcher behind the WorldWide Telescope, recently went missing [microsoft.com] on a sailing expedition. The search has already been suspended.

LS

Re:Question:

[Anonymous Coward]

Could you give an example?

I've been working with images and networks for a long time, and I've never seen anything that could even claim to do what Photosynth does automatically and seamlessly.

Saying that computers *could* do something for a long time is nothing like having a product that actually does those things through a seamless user experience.

Re:This is an invention?

[Metasquares]

Google also acquired many of their recent products, including Google Earth. If these big companies want to buy all of this stuff and release it to the public for free, however, I'm not going to complain :)