Today, the WorldWide Telescope gets an update ... a major update, as shown by this screenshot:
That's right - WWT has gone 3D . You can fly through the Solar System now, or zoom out further to see our place in the Milky Way, and the Milky Way's place as one of half a million galaxies found by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey.
We have also added several other new features, including the following:
* Tour animation - text and inserted images can expand, contract, move, spin, fade, etc within a slide.
* WWT can now be localized to your language of choice. (And you can help with the localization efforts.) To begin with, we've added a second language - Simplified Chinese.
* More data:
* Hundreds of new images from the Hubble, Chandra, Spitzer space telescopes
* A new Astrophotography section, with images from renowned astrophotographer Jack Newton.
* New surveys : GALEX in the ultraviolet band, Fermi in the gamma-ray band, as well as sixteen surveys about the Cosmic Microwave Background from the WMAP Science Team's Five Year release.
* Fifty new panoramas of Mars and the Moon, from the Phoenix, Spirit, Opportunity, Pathfinder, and Apollo missions. Some are red-blue anaglyphs, so get your 3d glasses out!
Those are the primary features, but there are several others:
* cone searching with NED (NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database) returning results as VOTables
* pressing F11 to enter and leave a full-screen mode
* saving to Desktop wallpaper
* changing planet sizes between Actual and Visible
* using a Xbox Controller or 3d Connexion Navigator
* going to locations defined using coordinate systems other than J2000
* textures on Saturnian and Uranian moons
* Earth globes where you can see polar regions
* panoramas of telescopes at Mauna Kea
Upcoming (in the next month)
* Utilities for you to get your own data and images into WorldWide Telescope format, and to produce WTML files - the XML format that WWT uses.
* The long awaited details on how to set up your own WWT Communities.
For more details and screenshots, see the WWT Data Blog.
To try it out, head over to the heavily revamped WorldWide Telescope website.
And please send your comments, positive and negative, to wwtpage@microsoft.com .
And keep checking the forums !
If you're in the press or a blogger, you might find these useful: