Microsoft Research has finally opened its WorldWide Telescope site so that everyone can now take and create their own space tours based on a vast database of astronomical images.
Microsoft says: "WorldWide Telescope stitches together terabytes of high-resolution images of celestial bodies and displays them in a way that relates to their actual position in the sky. People can freely browse through the solar system, galaxy and beyond, or take advantage of a growing number of guided tours of the sky hosted by astronomers and educators at major universities and planetariums."
This is the system that, famously, made blogger Robert Scoble cry.
The WorldWide Telescope is basically version 2.0 of the Sky Server that was developed by Microsoft researcher Jim Gray, and many others. I'm delighted to see that you can still read the paper co-authored by Jim Gray on the Sky Server (PDF), written in 1999. That was five years before Google bought Keyhole and eight years before Google did something similar with Google Sky.
Sadly, Jim Gray wasn't around to complete the project, being reported lost at sea. According to Wikipedia: "During a short solo sailing trip to the Farallon Islands near San Francisco to scatter his mother's ashes, his 40-foot yacht, Tenacious, was reported missing on Sunday, January 28, 2007."
I first saw the WorldWide Telescope previewed at Microsoft's TechFest early in 2007 and it should have been the star of TechFest 2008, where it was demonstrated. I didn't write about it at the time because space was very short and Microsoft scooped its own show by unveiling it at the TED conference a few days before. So it goes. But I'm planning to cover it in Netbytes.
