WorldWide Telescope is a powerful educational tool — a way of telling compelling stories about the Universe.

An On the Issues Essay came out last week featuring Alyssa Goodman, Professor of Astronomy, Harvard University.  Highlights how WWT can be used to not only browse and view the Universe – but can be a powerful tool to allow Astronomers to get to data and make discoveries.

A Virtual Telescope: Microsoft’s WorldWide Telescope is a powerful educational tool — a way of telling compelling stories about the Universe.

Seven years ago, a graduate student and I were analyzing an unusual image of the gas jettisoned by a forming star, named PV Ceph, when we realized the image could best be explained if the young star were speeding Alyssa Goodman, Professor of Astronomy, Harvard Universityacross the sky ten times faster than normal. But confirming our hypothesis required us to spend two years accumulating, overlaying and analyzing many more images made using ground- and spacebased radio, infrared and optical telescopes.

Today, a project of this kind would be much easier thanks to the WorldWide Telescope, a rich, Web-based software application that anyone can download from www.worldwidetelescope.org. Released last month by Microsoft Research, the WorldWide Telescope stitches together images from the world’s best ground- and space-based telescopes to enable a seamless exploration of the Universe.

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A Virtual Telescope: Microsoft’s WorldWide Telescope is a powerful educational tool — a way of telling compelling stories about the Universe.