Microsoft Has Made World Wide Telescope Open Source

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Link: Open WWT

 

...WorldWide Telescope began in 2007 as a research project, led from within Microsoft Research. Early partners included astronomers and educators from Caltech, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Northwestern, the University of Chicago, and several NASA facilities. Thanks to these collaborations and Microsoft’s leadership, WWT has reached its goal of creating a free unified contextual visualization of the Universe with global reach that lets users explore multispectral imagery, all of which is deeply connected to scholarly publications and online research databases.

 

The WWT software was designed with rich interactivity in mind. Guided tours which can be created within the program, offer scripted paths through the 3D environment, allowing media-rich interactive stories to be told, about anything from star formation to the discovery of the large scale structure of the Universe. On the web, WWT is used as both as a standalone program and as an API, in teaching and in research—where it offers unparalleled options for sharing and contextualizing data sets, on the “2D” multispectral sky and/or within the “3D” Universe....