WorldWide Telescope is a rich visualization environment that functions as a virtual telescope, bringing together imagery from the best ground- and space-based telescopes to enable seamless exploration of the universe.
Choose from a growing number of guided tours of the sky by astronomers and educators from some of the most famous observatories and planetariums in the country. You can pause a tour at any time and explore on your own. Or you can stop and research a deep sky object with the multiple information sources available. When you are ready, rejoin the tour where you left off.
WorldWide Telescope, created with Microsoft Corps high-performance Visual Experience Engine, enables seamless panning and zooming around the night sky, planets and image environments.
View the sky from multiple wavelengths: See the X-ray view of the sky and zoom into bright radiation clouds, and then cross-fade into the visible light view and discover the cloud remnants of a supernova explosion from 1,000 years ago.
Pan and zoom from aerial views of the moon and selected planets, and see their precise positions in the sky from any location on Earth, at any time in the past or future.
The WorldWide Telescope is a single rich application portal that blends terabytes of images, data and stories from multiple sources over the Internet into a media-rich, immersive experience. Space explorers of all ages will feel empowered to navigate and understand the universe with the WorldWide Telescopes simple yet powerful user interface.
Free for Windows XP and Vista.