Microsoft Research Community

Here's a handy trick, especially for computers with lower-speed connections: Open a collection (Hubble, Spitzer, etc.) and then play it as a slide show (Explore.Play collection as slide show).

This will fill your cache with the images for each of those items, and give you the surrounding stellar background as well. Subsequent visits to any of those objects will be much faster.

You can do a similar thing with tours with Guided Tours.Auto Repeat.

Enjoy!

Good advice.  Maybe Microsoft will eventually allow people to just dowload pre-cached image sets.  Torrents would be my suggestion since they can get quite large.

 Distributing imagesets via torrents would be great. I'm on a 15Mb line and still having trouble with the guided tours.Then again their servers are probably under a decent amount of strain atm.

While I'm at it, may I suggest a "Suggestions" Forum, or at least a stickied thread. 

I agree - being able to download all the data from a torrent would be excellent, especially to give to people with slow/non-existant/capped connections.