Recomputing the Sky

An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft has unveiled the largest and clearest image of the night sky ever assembled. This so-called 'TeraPixel' sky map was generated with the help of some of Microsoft's latest HPC and parallel software assets. Quoting: 'Compared to the old sky image, the TeraPixel version is much more refined. With all the artifacts, seams and inconsistencies processed away, it looks like a true unified image of the sky above. It's like going from Super Mario Brothers on 1985-era Nintendo consoles to Halo 2 on Xbox 360s.'" You can view the image at Microsoft's WorldWide Telescope site — it requires the Silverlight plugin for Windows or Mac. No word at the site about Linux or whether Moonlight works there.

Even Baking Ads Into Their Analogies

[eldavojohn]

It's like going from Super Mario Brothers on 1985-era Nintendo consoles to Halo 2 on Xbox 360s

Oh, I see what you did there. Here, let me try:

It's like going from gaming on Windows 1.0 in 1985 to 1985-era Nintendo consoles

Or what about

It's like going from a red ring of death on an XBox console to Gran Turismo 3 on a Playstation 2

Oh and I also enjoy that you used your Space Act Agreement with NASA to "make planetary images and data available via the Internet to the public" and also promote the download and installation of silvercrap. Can't do something for the public without advertising and pushing proprietary software on people, can we? I hope Google gets the chance to do this with HTML5.

If mixing metaphors were illegal...

[Minwee]

It's like going from Super Mario Brothers on 1985-era Nintendo consoles to Halo 2 on Xbox 360s

You mean the sky it gets a whole lot easier, starts holding your hard and tells you which stars to look at?

Or can we now look at the old night sky on our mobile phones using emulators, now that the new night sky is filled with nerd-raging teenaged frat boys?

Re:Getting ready for the MS bash

[pinkushun]

I hope you're wrong too :-)

Oh wait... the source material from the SDSS (Sloan Digital Sky Survey) runs the hardware with the help of... drum roll... Linux (ref page 24 [sdss.org])

BAM!

Google Maps

[tepples]

it's pretty trivial to make a Silverlight interface to pan and zoom around a giant image like this.

Yet Google managed to pull off Google Maps in JavaScript.

Re:Getting ready for the MS bash

[hedwards]

Um, they didn't give the TCP/IP stack away, they borrowed it from BSD. In other words, they gave away something that they had been given and which other people could've easily gotten from the original source. I'm not really sure why MS should get any sort of credit for that.