Dan on eScience & Technical Computing @ Microsoft : WWT

Amazon Web Services support Sloan Digital Sky Survey DR6 Subset

Dan Fay — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 00:11:45 GMT

Now that AWS is supporting SDSS, there is probably useful integration between the Worldwide Telescope and the SDSS datasets that can be leveraged, beyond what is currently supported - such as seeing the all the known galaxies in a 3D view – seeing the lattice structure of the universe.

Search and Browse data from the Virtual Observatory and plot data over imagery: WorldWide Telescope delivers one-click contextual access to distributed Web information and data sources and Interoperates through SAMP and other popular tools like TopCat, Aladin, SAOImage DS9 and many more.

Data derived from researchers using the AWS datasets can integrate imagery and catalog data directly into WorldWide Telescope using the WWT Developer Kit.

Professional features

Virtual Observatory Cone search/registry look up and SIMBAD search
Load and Adjust basic FITS images and AVM files
SIAP with footprint preview
Connect your Telescope to WWT
Multi-monitor cluster rendering
Visualization of large scale structure
SAMP Inter-application communication
Full dome projection

New Public Data Set: Sloan Digital Sky Survey DR6 Subset

The Sloan Digital Sky Survey, or SDSS, is now available as a Public Data Set.

Weighing in at 180 GB, the SDSS is the most ambitious astronomical survey ever undertaken. The researchers have used a 2.5 meter, 120 megapixel telescope located in Apache Point, New Mexico to capture images of over one quarter of the sky, or about 230 million celestial objects. They have also created 3-dimensional maps containing more than 930,000 galaxies and 120,000 quasars.

Amazon Web Services Blog: New Public Data Set: Sloan Digital Sky Survey DR6 Subset

TIME - WorldWideTelescope one of 50 Best Websites 2009

Dan Fay — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 23:29:15 GMT

TIME magazine has the WorldWide Telescope WebClient (Silverlight) on their list of 50 Best Websites for 2009. That puts WWT in with sites like Flickr, Twitter, Skype, YouTube, Amazon, and even PhotoSynth – not bad for the very small team we have on it :-)

WorldWideTelescope

Like Google Earth for the heavens, WWT aggregates terabytes of astronomical data from the world's biggest telescopes to create a single virtual scope that anyone can look through. WWT is not a model of the known universe, but rather a centralized repository for just about everything known about the universe. The idea is to democratize the science of astronomy with a single tool that can be used by students and scientists. Who knows, when everyone has access to the same data, maybe the next big discovery in astronomy will be made by an amateur? There are hundreds of terabytes of digitized sky — enough data for everyone

WorldWideTelescope - 50 Best Websites 2009 - TIME

Preview the upcoming Eclipse of the Sun in WWT

Dan Fay — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 01:20:59 GMT

On July 22nd there will be a total eclipse of the Sun that will last for over 6 mins that is visible from within a narrow corridor that traverses half of Earth. One of the best regions to see it will be China and the organizers have published a WorldWide Telescope tour previewing the Eclipse.

See the trailer (below) for the project, "Multi-site Federated Live Broadcast of Solar Eclipse on July 22, International Year of Astronomy 2009"

Citizen Science Impact: Hanny’s Voorwerp and the Galaxy Zoo

Dan Fay — Thu, 21 May 2009 18:51:00 GMT

If you ever wonder what how normal citizens can have an impact in science – take a listen to the latest Podcast from 365 Days of Astronomy and how a mild manner school teacher from the Netherlands found a strange object while participating in Galaxy Zoo. Now with the Hubble servicing mission complete – we’ll hopefully see future pictures of the Hanny’s Voorwerp.

Check it out on WorldWide Telescope with the tour I made after I first heard about it.

May 21st Podcast: Hanny’s Voorwerp and the Galaxy Zoo

In 2007 Dutch school teacher Hanny van Arkel discovered a unique deep space object never before described... from the comfort of her computer chair! Learn about how her love of music led her down a path of astronomical discovery.

May 21st: Hanny’s Voorwerp and the Galaxy Zoo

WorldWide Telescope – Busy couple of weeks – NASA and SilverLight

Dan Fay — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 23:53:06 GMT

Yesterday the joint press release went out on the collaboration and Space Act Agreement we’re been working on with NASA for sometime. We’re really excited about working with NASA to process many datasets like the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) and make them available in WorldWide Telescope. Having these images available in the TOAST (tesselated octahedral adaptive subdivision transform) projection format will not only benefit WWT but any viewer supporting that format. The benefit of using TOAST as Jonathan Fay one mentioned “It creates a 360-degree wraparound view that’s either a planet surface or the infinite sphere of the sky, and lets you represent it using a 3D graphics accelerator, very rapidly and efficiently. So we can have an image pyramid the way Deep Zoom does, and TerraServer before it, but we don’t have to give up the poles.”

NASA and Microsoft to Make Universe of Data Available to the Public

There is a really good article out talking about some of the background behind Curtis Wong and Jonathan Fay’s labor of love. WorldWide Telescope Puts Wonders of Space on a PC

The other big news is that at Mix09 we put out a alpha release of the worldwide telescope web client built using SilverLight. Now all the folks running Macs can see what all the buzz was behind Scoble’s post What made me cry: Microsoft’s World Wide Telescope from last year.

WWT at TechFest on NYTimes.com

Dan Fay — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 19:49:24 GMT

The NYTimes.com article by Ashlee Vance, included a great picture by Stuart Isett for The New York Times showing the dome that was put together for TechFest to demonstrate the planetarium projection mode of WWT as well as the gesture interaction from Andy Wilson and Hrvoje Benko.

Microsoft Maps Course to a Jetsons-Style Future

Stuart Isett for The New York Times

Hrvoje Benko demonstrating a Microsoft projection system that lets people manipulate large video images with their hands.

Microsoft Maps Course to a Jetsons-Style Future - NYTimes.com

Microsoft Research TechFest 2009

Dan Fay — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 21:31:26 GMT

Today is the first day of the MSR TechFest 2009 – a showcase of MSR technologies – you can see pictures from TechFest. One of the demos I’m loosely tied to is Interactions with an Omni-Directional Projector – which utilizes WorldWide Telescope projected on a dome with gesture interaction. The neat part about it is that it brings together the great interaction (hands) work from Andy Wilson and Hrvoje Benko from the Adaptive Systems and Interaction and Jonathan Fay (no relation)

TechFest is much like a Science Fair – booths to demonstrate new algorithms, discoveries, etc. Great place to wander and dream what the magic of software can do….

TechFest 2009

TechFest is an annual event that brings researchers from Microsoft Research’s labs around the world to Redmond to share their latest work with Microsoft product teams. Attendees experience some of the freshest, most innovative technologies emerging from Microsoft’s research efforts. The event provides a forum in which product teams and researchers can discuss the novel work occurring in the labs, thereby encouraging effective technology transfer into Microsoft products.

TechFest 2009 - Microsoft Research

Using Flickr for Astronomy – and viewing in WWT

Dan Fay — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 01:55:17 GMT

The use of online services such as Flickr to help scientists is in its infancy and applications utilizing commodity based solutions will continue to pick up momentum. I especially like the integration and the ease of use – science should be about discovery and exploration – not about the technology. Of course the ability to view those analyzed images in WorldWide Telescope completes the circle and allows you to view the image in context.

Check out the Orion Nebula.
After it opens up – click on the thumbnail at the top.

You can also add your own – check out Dinoj’s post on the WWT Data Blog - Sticking images on the sky with WWT. For fun you can see the crown for the Corona Borealis overlaid on the sky

See the article written by Frederic Lardinois on ReadWriteWeb.

The Great Gig in the Sky: Using Flickr for Astronomy

Flickr hosts a wide range of beautiful images, but a new project built on top of Flickr's API only focuses on photos of the night sky from amateur astronomers. The Astrometry.net project constantly scans the Astrometry Flickr group for new images to catalog and to add to its open-source sky survey. At the same time, this project also provides a more direct service to the amateur astronomers, as it also analyzes each image and returns a high-quality description of the photo's contents.

The Astrometry group currently has over 400 members, and as Christoper Stumm, a member of the Astrometry.net team, told the Flickr Code blog, the back-end software uses geometric hashing to exactly pinpoint and describe the objects in the images. When you submit an image to the Flickr pool, the robot will not just respond with a comment that contains an exact description of what you see in the image, but it will also annotate the image automatically.

While a lot of members of the Astrometry group use high-end telescopes and cameras, the Astrometry.net solver can also analyze images from consumer-level digital cameras.

While just being able to automatically analyze and catalog these images is pretty cool already, every description also contains a link that displays the image in Microsoft's WordWide Telescope.

Astronomy is one of those few scientific disciplines where dedicated amateurs can still make major discoveries and this is definitely one of the cooler applications of Flickr's API that we have seen in a long time.

The Great Gig in the Sky: Using Flickr for Astronomy - ReadWriteWeb

The Earth, Stars, and Planets in 3D

Dan Fay — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 22:20:10 GMT

One of the coolest new features of the WWT Solstice Borealis Beta (released at the beginning of Jan) is the ability to see the Earth, Stars, and Planets in a stereoscopic 3D effect. I’ve been using the Anaglyph mode (View | {arrow} | Stereo | Anaglyph) which uses the stylish red/cyan glasses shown below to not only look at the Stars, but you can zoom all the way out and see the lattice structure made up galaxies of the universe. Checking out the planets, like Mars, Saturn, etc is also very impressive. Going down to Earth, you can change your perspective by holding down the ctrl key and then you can fly into objects like Mount St. Helens

Mount St. Helens in normal view Mount St. Helens in stereoscopic view

Check it out if you have a pair of red/cyan glasses – they are all the rage :-)

WorldWide Telescope Academic Development Kit Release -Microsoft Research

Dan Fay — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 01:21:39 GMT

With this ADK, users can convert their own astronomical images/data to the format that can be read by WWT and share with other WWT users. Can’t wait to see more images/datasets made available.

WorldWide Telescope Academic Development Kit, January 2009 Release

The WorldWide Telescope (WWT) Academic Development Kit, January 2009 release contains two utilities that enable people to convert their astronomical images, panoramas, sky surveys, and planetary textures to a format that can be read by WWT and shared with other WWT users. It produces image pyramids of the photographs, thumbnails, and WTML files. WTML files are XML files in the WWT format that point to the images on the Internet and store details of how they are to be displayed in WWT and metadata such as image title and credits. The WWT SphereToaster Tool enables users to provide images in an equirectangular format that covers all or part of the inside or outside of a sphere. This includes, for example, cylindrical projections of panoramas and all-sky surveys. SphereToaster converts these to a different projection system—the TOAST system, currently unique to WWT—and then stores an image pyramid of the resulting TOAST-projected image. The tool also produces thumbnails and WTML files. The WWT StudyChopper Tool enables users to provide photographs of small parts of the sky, such as a high-resolution image of the Crab Nebula, and enter appropriate coordinate information and metadata. It creates image pyramids of the photographs, thumbnails, and WTML files. Once the output image pyramids and thumbnails are hosted by the user's servers and the WTML files are made available to others, anyone with access to the WTML files will be able to browse the images in WWT.

WorldWide Telescope Academic Development Kit, January 2009 Release - Microsoft Research

WALL•E's Universe in WorldWide Telescope

Dan Fay — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 07:24:27 GMT

Now this is fun science - Microsoft Research and Disney•Pixar team up to offer guided tours of the universe with WorldWide Telescope – how better to get our children interested in science and the universe – for most of us it was the Apollo Missions that interested in science and space, now WALL•E is a good ambassador.

WALL•E's Universe

Explore the Universe with WALL•E and Andrew Stanton. Zoom, pan, spin and learn about planets, constellations, stars and galaxies.

© Disney/Pixar

WorldWide Telescope

How the WorldWide Telescope works

Dan Fay — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 01:30:59 GMT

Jon Udell gets the details from Jonathan Fay (no relation) on how WWT works. How the WorldWide Telescope works

WorldWide Telescope on Microsoft.com

Dan Fay — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 02:47:24 GMT

WorldWide Telescope is a powerful educational tool — a way of telling compelling stories about the Universe.

Dan Fay — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 23:04:52 GMT

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.

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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.

WorldWide Telescope - you haven't seen it?

Dan Fay — Fri, 16 May 2008 09:18:43 GMT

I decided to wait a bit before blogging about the release of WorldWide Telescope (WWT) to see how everything went and what the initial reaction would be. After Curtis and Jonathan showed me an earlier version over 18 months ago - I knew they were onto something...I fell in love with the sky once again. The images I could access were nothing short of beautiful and the experience of zooming in and out of spaces was second nature. Who needs a user manual? Of course then when you here the excitement in Benjamin's voice as he talks about the crab nebula you also have to remember what it felt like to be a child...

Anyhow, I so loved it when I ran across this post - this is exactly what WWT is all about - letting individuals find interesting items and letting others know about them...

Skull at mars / Esqueleto en Marte

Yesterday I was using the new Microsoft's WWT (World Wide Telescope) and in it's panorama view, I decided to zoom some rocks, and "surprise" I found a little one, very near to the rover wheels, that looks diferent. Here are some pictures, judge them yourself.

JP-IP: Skull at mars / Esqueleto en Marte