Downloaded the WorldWide Telescope (WWT) app from Microsoft Research last night. In a word: Beautiful. Highly recommended.
The program lets you fly through the night sky, visiting pictures captured by earth bound telescopes as well as those from Hubble and the like. You can’t visit the surface of Mars at ground level alongside one of the Mars rovers, but you can zoom into a nicely displayed image of Mars which slowly floats across the screen. Yes, everything is moving! It’s cool just to zoom so that Mars or some other planet is in view and sit there and slowly watch it to pan off to the side. To do so, click on “Search” in the toolbar and type whatever planet or star you’d like to zoom to. The Worldwide Telescope does the rest.
Besides visiting a surface like Mars or the moon, one other cool thing I’d like to do with WWT: use it as a spacecraft simulator. Imagine if you could define your own rocket, launch it at a specific time of day, to a specific heading, and then “guide” it to some point in space. That would be cool. Since paths are definable in WWT I imagine there’s some way to do this with the either a helper app or a 3rd party toolbar add on. I see that the team is trying to open up the app to developers in some way, though nothing is available yet.
I’m wondering if the third party access would enable you to add and share your own telescope images–yeah that might make a mess, but then again a WikiTelescope would be kind of cool–especially if you had a picture that made it into the collection.
I’ve been passing the WWT link around all morning and everyone has been excited to hear about the program. At least one person has experiences crashes and can’t run the program. This is on a Vista machine with some classic driver problems. I’m wondering if there isn’t pushing his drivers over the edge again. Hmmm.
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