An On the Issues Essay came out last week featuring Alyssa Goodman, Professor of Astronomy, Harvard University. Highlights how WWT can be used to not only browse and view the Universe – but can be a powerful tool to allow Astronomers to get to data and make discoveries.
A Virtual Telescope: Microsoft’s WorldWide Telescope is a powerful educational tool — a way of telling compelling stories about the Universe. Seven years ago, a graduate student and I were analyzing an unusual image of the gas jettisoned by a forming star, named PV Ceph, when we realized the image could best be explained if the young star were speeding across the sky ten times faster than normal. But confirming our hypothesis required us to spend two years accumulating, overlaying and analyzing many more images made using ground- and spacebased radio, infrared and optical telescopes. Today, a project of this kind would be much easier thanks to the WorldWide Telescope, a rich, Web-based software application that anyone can download from www.worldwidetelescope.org. Released last month by Microsoft Research, the WorldWide Telescope stitches together images from the world’s best ground- and space-based telescopes to enable a seamless exploration of the Universe. <…>
Seven years ago, a graduate student and I were analyzing an unusual image of the gas jettisoned by a forming star, named PV Ceph, when we realized the image could best be explained if the young star were speeding across the sky ten times faster than normal. But confirming our hypothesis required us to spend two years accumulating, overlaying and analyzing many more images made using ground- and spacebased radio, infrared and optical telescopes.
Today, a project of this kind would be much easier thanks to the WorldWide Telescope, a rich, Web-based software application that anyone can download from www.worldwidetelescope.org. Released last month by Microsoft Research, the WorldWide Telescope stitches together images from the world’s best ground- and space-based telescopes to enable a seamless exploration of the Universe.
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A Virtual Telescope: Microsoft’s WorldWide Telescope is a powerful educational tool — a way of telling compelling stories about the Universe.
Video showing Stonehenge in Photosynth off the National Geographic Magazine site - Stonehenge Photosynth: 3-D Exploration
Just ran across he DeepEarth OpenSource community project on CodePlex - bringing SilverLight 2 Deep Zoom to Virtual Earth - it pans and zooms really smooth. Test it out or check out the video
The Top500 list was released and the cluster at NCSA came in at 23rd running a beta of Windows HPC 2008. What’s really interesting is the 77% efficiency and that it only took 4 hours to install the 1200 node cluster.
Press Article - Windows HPC Server 2008 debuts in top 25 of the world’s TOP500 largest supercomputers. Ranked at 23, the NCSA cluster performed at 68.5 TFlops and 77.7% efficiency.
Video