Resource: Worldwide Telescope

Worldwide Telescope
http://www.worldwid etelescope. org/

The WorldWide Telescope (WWT) is a Web 2.0 visualization software
environment that enables your computer to function as a virtual
telescope—bringing together imagery from the best ground and space-
based telescopes in the world for a seamless exploration of the
universe.

Choose from a growing number of guided tours of the sky by
astronomers and educators from some of the most famous observatories
and planetariums in the country. Feel free at any time to pause the
tour, explore on your own (with multiple information sources for
objects at your fingertips), and rejoin the tour where you left off.
Join Harvard Astronomer Alyssa Goodman on a journey showing how dust
in the Milky Way Galaxy condenses into stars and planets. Take a tour
with University of Chicago Cosmologist Mike Gladders two billion
years into the past to see a gravitational lens bending the light
from galaxies allowing you to see billions more years into the past.

WorldWide Telescope is created with the Microsoft® high performance
Visual Experience Engine™ and allows seamless panning and zooming
around the night sky, planets, and image environments. View the sky
from multiple wavelengths: See the x-ray view of the sky and zoom
into bright radiation clouds, and then crossfade into the visible
light view and discover the cloud remnants of a supernova explosion
from a thousand years ago. Switch to the Hydrogen Alpha view to see
the distribution and illumination of massive primordial hydrogen
cloud structures lit up by the high energy radiation coming from
nearby stars in the Milky Way. These are just two of many different
ways to reveal the hidden structures in the universe with the
WorldWide Telescope. Seamlessly pan and zoom from aerial views of the
Moon and selected planets, as well as see their precise positions in
the sky from any location on Earth and any time in the past or future
with the Microsoft Visual Experience Engine.

WWT is a single rich application portal that blends terabytes of
images, information, and stories from multiple sources over the
Internet into a seamless, immersive, rich media experience. Kids of
all ages will feel empowered to explore and understand the universe
with its simple and powerful user interface.

Microsoft Research is dedicating WorldWide Telescope to the memory of
Jim Gray and is releasing WWT as a free resource to the astronomy and
education communities with the hope that it will inspire and empower
people to explore and understand the universe like never before.