WorldWide Telescope 5.5.03

Microsoft WorldWide Telescope (WWT) is a web visualization software environment that enables your computer to function as a virtual telescope.

It combines imagery from the world’s finest ground and space-based telescopes, offering a seamless journey through the cosmos.

WorldWide Telescope is created using Microsoft’s high-performance Visual Experience Engine, which enables smooth panning and zooming across the night sky. It blends terabytes of images, data, and stories from multiple sources over the Internet into a media-rich immersive experience.

WorldWide Telescope (WWT) offers a seamless journey through the cosmos, from your web browser to your desktop to a full-dome planetarium. It combines imagery from the world’s finest ground- and space-based telescopes with 3D navigation.

Embark on narrated guided tours led by astronomers and educators, exploring fascinating celestial objects. You can also research and import your data, visualize it, and create personalized tours to share with others.

Select from a growing collection of guided tours of the sky, led by astronomers and educators from renowned observatories and planetariums worldwide. Pause the tour whenever you wish to explore independently, accessing a wealth of information about celestial objects. Then, effortlessly rejoin the tour at your starting point.

To fully appreciate the power of the WorldWide Telescope, it’s important to recognize that celestial objects emit energy across a broad range of wavelengths, from radio waves to infrared, optical to ultraviolet, and even including X-rays and gamma rays.

The mission of the WorldWide Telescope:

• To aggregate scientific data from major telescopes, observatories, and institutions. Also to make temporal and multi-spectral studies available through a single, cohesive Internet-based portal.
• To stimulate interest in science among younger generations. To provide a compelling base for teaching astronomy, scientific discovery, and computational science

The physical processes within these objects can only be understood by combining observations across multiple wavelengths, which is where the beauty of WWT shines. It brings together an impressive array of archives of celestial objects, carefully constructed from observations by instruments such as the Hubble Space Telescope, the Chandra X-ray Observatory, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), and the Two Micron All-Sky Survey (2MASS).

WorldWide Telescope 5 Features:

• Navigate seamlessly through 3D spherical environments: the Sky, Planets, and our Solar System
• Access to hundreds of terabytes of sky, earth, and planet data
• View, create, and edit guided tours
• Experience the 3D Solar System view with moon orbits, asteroids, and more
• Access billions of objects in a web-based astronomical catalog
• Use touch controls for touch-screen navigation
• Travel 2,000 years forward and backward in time