Two virtual astronomical telescopes promise to transform the way people view and study the cosmos.
The teLeScope, It said, is like a time machine in that when you focus on a star, you see that star as it actually appeared tens or even
is often
thousands of years in the past. That’s how long it takes for light—zipping along at a speed of 300,000 kilometers per second—to cross the vast gulf of space between “there” and “here.” These look-back times, as astronomers sometimes call them, can reach astonishing proportions. When you focus your backyard telescope on something like the Andromeda Galaxy, for example, you are looking at light that has been traveling more than two million years to reach your eye. But that’s nothing compared with the purview of the world’s most powerful telescopes, such as the W.M. Keck, located near the summit of Mauna Kea on the Big Island of Hawaii, or the Hubble Space Telescope, orbiting above the distorting effects of Earth’s atmosphere. These time machines have revealed galaxies that appear as they were more than 13 billion years ago—or 13 billion light-years away—an epoch in time when the universe was only about 800 million years old.
It boggles the mind, such space and time. There are simply no adequate words to describe the enormity of the universe or its spectacular, never-end-ing assortment of stars, nebulae, and galaxies. But now, two powerful Web applications—Microsoft’s WorldWide Telescope (WWT) and Google Sky— are providing users with new ways to explore the universe. Both essentially turn a personal computer into a multi-use virtual telescope.
microsoft’s World Wide telescope contains a wealth of data and images, such as this partial view of the orion nebula from sloan Digital sky survey.
scope available to the public. At the time, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates called the WWT “a powerful tool for science and education that makes it possible for everyone to explore the universe.” The application itself is not a simple browser with links, but an integrated amalgam of data and images from such surveys as the Digitized Sky
Last May, Microsoft launched the beta version of its WorldWide Telescope, making it the most recent desktop tele-
Survey, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, the Hubble Space Telescope, the Chan-dra X-ray Observatory, and the Spitzer Space Telescope. Thus, images are available across multiple wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum. The application, which is coded in Microsoft’s C# .NET and created with Microsoft’s Visual Experience Engine, is a combination of software and Web services that allows users to pan smoothly across the sky while accessing terabytes of images and data from multiple sources. Microsoft likens the result to a “media-rich, immersive experience,” with applications for both amateur and professional astronomers.
Users can zoom in on the Orion Nebula, for example, and cross-fade from one wavelength view of the nebula to another, revealing hot pockets of gas, which unaided human eyes cannot visually detect, and young stars embedded in obscuring clouds of dust. Cross-fading provides a powerful method of literally looking into the environments
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