Oliver Bell’s weblog

In recent years one of the more entertaining parts of working for Microsoft has been watching some of the innovation coming out of Microsoft Research.

On the wires today is news of a beta release of the Worldwide Telescope project.

The tool brings together a combination of images, looking up at the sky and down at the ground - stare into the stars, or reverse the angle and zoom into your street or home town instead.

The full press release can be found here;

The service goes well beyond the simple browsing of images. Users can choose which telescope they want to look through, including the Hubble Space Telescope, the Chandra X-Ray Observatory Center, the Spitzer Space Telescope or others. They can view the locations of planets in the night sky — in the past, present or future. They can view the universe through different wavelengths of light to reveal hidden structures in other parts of the galaxy. Taken as a whole, the application provides a top-to-bottom view of the science of astronomy.

“Users can see the X-ray view of the sky, zoom into bright radiation clouds, and then cross-fade into the visible light view and discover the cloud remnants of a supernova explosion from a thousand years ago,” said Roy Gould, a researcher at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. “I believe this new creation from Microsoft will have a profound impact on the way we view the universe.”

My wife’s grandfather was an astronomer and scientist by the name of Kenneth Franklin who among other things is co-credited with discovering that Jupiter emitted radio waves. These were the first detected radio signals from another planet.

I only got the chance to meet him twice, but I’m pretty confident he would have liked this project!