Having conquered much of planet Earth, Microsoft  is turning at least some of its attention to the sky. WorldWide Telescope (WWT), a free tool that allows users to explore images of the night sky, will become available at the end of this month.
WWT, developed by Microsoft Research Labs using the company's Visual Experience Engine, enables a home PC to become an engine for exploring the galaxies. It utilizes terabytes of images and data from telescopes worldwide and from the Hubble orbiting telescope.
'An Observatory on Your Desktop'
In a speech at a conference in Jakarta Friday, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates told news media that the software "takes very complex data gathered over many years from many telescopes" and makes it accessible to a desktop user. He described it as "an observatory on your desktop."
The WWT project was designed to be ready for 2009, which is the 400th anniversary of Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei's first public observations of space, using a simple telescope.
According to news reports, the project holds information on more than 300 million stellar systems. Some astronomers have said they expect the project to have as much of an impact on the way we view the universe as did the view conveyed by Galileo. For instance, schoolchildren will be able to devise their own visual tours of the universe as classroom projects.
Much of the interaction will make disparate images seem as if they are part of a single set of images. According to news reports, the user can zoom into sections of the sky by clicking on the images, which come from some of the largest Earth-bound telescopes as well as spacecraft. The software stitches together the images into a virtual sky.
There will also be commentaries, such as downloadable podcasts from leading astronomers and researchers that expand on the images. Users will also be able to post commentaries.
Picking Up the Research
In March, WWT was demonstrated at the Technology, Entertainment, and Design (TED) conference.
During the presentation Curtis Wong, manager of next media research at Microsoft, told the audience that the work on the underlying Visual Experience Engine had been started by longtime Microsoft scientist Jim Gray. In the middle of his development on the engine, Gray mysteriously vanished at sea while scattering his mother's ashes, and the Microsoft team decided to continue his work.
But Microsoft's intention to become a facilitator to tours of the world's knowledge does not end at space. Gates also told his audience that the data-collection techniques used for WWT could someday be applied to other subjects such as genomics, although he did not elaborate on whether the software giant is working on such possibilities.
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