WorldWide Telescope

Microsoft research just released a beta of its WorldWide Telescope program. Its absolutely amazing if you're at all interested in astronomy. It reminds me of Star trek, where they have an "astrometrics lab" which they could use to view various parts of the galaxy, the holy grail of astronomers everywhere. Once you download the program to your computer, and with a fast enough computer and connection, you can view the solar system in a way that feels very fluid, quick, and natural. So many other programs, while informative, feel unnatural when you use them. They don't feel like you're gazing out into the heavens, they feel like you're staring at a poster thru a needle. When viewing objects within solar system, it gives an exact place of the object in the sky, and it even has subtle shakes, which make it feel as though you're really looking thru a real telescope. I especially like the ability to right click an object to gain more astrological data on the object's position, and if you click "research", follow the menus deep enough, you can view that object's wikipedia entry. Its that sort of integration that make tools like this truly useful. You can configure the view to reflect your position on the earth, and even integrate with an external telescope. The menu system seems to borrow from MS Word 2008's ribbon menu system, which can be non-intuitive to people who are used to normal menu systems. I think that it is more intuitive to non-experienced users. I suggest trying the option to view the panoramics from various moons and planets, i especially like the guided tours function, which feels like your own personal planetarium show. You can download the WorldWide Telescope program by clicking here. Its very similar to google's recent addition of sky to its Earth program. WorldWide Telescope is a beta, and I've seen a few programing flaws in just the little time I've used it, but its still interesting and worth the time to try. Unfortunately, it runs on windows only, being a Microsoft program. I look forward to seeing this out of beta, and on a projection screen and gesture-based interface, this has the potential to become that coveted "astrometrics lab".