Microsoft Unveils Telescope for the Masses

WorldWide Telescope, which is a free program, was developed in partnership with about a dozen universities, planetariums, research institutes, telescope operations centers, educational foundations and science media outlets.

Users choose which telescopes they want to use, the celestial targets (past, present and future) and the wavelength of light to explore. Objects that are very hot, for example, such as young stars, radiate stronger in ultraviolet wavelengths of light, rather than the visible. Planetary nebula, which often are draped in thick dust, illuminate powerfully in infrared.

"It's like the human genome project," said Johns Hopkins University physicist Alex Szalay, who helped develop the project. "It maps out the cosmos in all kinds of wavelengths. You can zoom in and out very easily. There is no other astronomical tool that even comes close."

Szalay told Discovery News he expects new discoveries will come from WorldWide Telescope users, similar to how a Dutch schoolteacher using online imagery in a project called GalaxyZoo made a major find of a ring-like structure in gas surrounding a galaxy. A distant quasar shining through the gas crated a blue glow, which previously had been dismissed as a camera artifact.

"This will make the process of making discoveries much easier because we will see if something is a little out of context," Szalay said. "It just makes it so easy, and so interactive -- and also so beautiful."

Related Links:

Irene Klotz's blog: Free Space

WorldWide Telescope

Google Sky

GalaxyZoo