So everyone is buzzing over the World Wide Telescope, a project from Microsoft that connects telescope across the world and in space, and wraps them up into a very slick interface that lets you tour the Universe.
Roy Gould, an educator at Harvard, gave a presentation about the WWT at TED, the mega-unber-geek conference held in California every year. Here’s the video.
This does look very cool. It’s much like Google Sky, but from Microsoft’s direction. Google tends to build software that allows people to add to it, while Microsoft tends to produce finished products. Both have their advantages, though in this case it’s hard to see which will go where. Right now there isn’t a huge amount of info out on the WWT; everyone’s talking about how cool it is, but at the moment we’re light on specifics. They should come out very soon, by the spring.
Years ago, when I was still in California, there was a small astronomical space observatory mission being proposed to NASA, and my group was the head of the education and outreach part of the proposal. One of our ideas was to include the mission data into a collective database of observatory observations called the National Virtual Observatory. Microsoft genius Jim Gray (the man who, sadly, is presumed lost in his boat of the coast of California last year) was involved with that, and I see his name attached to the WWT as well. I presume there is some connection, so I’m naturally very curious about this project.
As I learn more I’ll be sure to write about it (well, whatever they let me write 
).
February 29th, 2008 at 11:14 am
It’ll probably crash your computer.
February 29th, 2008 at 11:16 am
Oh Phil.
As you posted this I was writing my own little thing on my blog. And I can’t stop giggling about the possibilities…
Are we going to be the citizens of a buggy universe? Will hackers and virus writers attack the Bug Nebula? And will Microsoft themselves charge “upgrade prices” for new eyepieces? Or larger telescopes to see farther?
“Yes, you can see the detail in QSO 3c273. you just need the upgrade. That will be (insert large number of monetary units) for your license key.”
“I’m sorry, but ‘Windows to the Universe Genuine Advantage Tool’ has determined your Universe to be a pirated version. To receive a key to a genuine Universe, please click here.”
And what happens if you are observing something important, and the stars disappear and the sky turns blue? That brings the phrase “Blue Screen of Death” to proportions no one wants to think about? And just how would we go about rebooting the Universe? would there actually BE a ctrl-alt-del?
Food for thought.
February 29th, 2008 at 11:19 am
I played with Microsoft’s Photo Tourism a year or two ago. It is also a really cool idea, but the few times I played with it, my computer crashed quite badly.
February 29th, 2008 at 11:23 am
Oh, this is going to be a pain in my computer’s butt.
February 29th, 2008 at 11:23 am
Sorry, it is called Photosynth. But don’t bother if you read this on a Mac/Linux machine.
February 29th, 2008 at 11:38 am
Microsoft tends to produce finished products.
Oh. My. Can that be any more wrong? It doesn’t seem like it.
Microsoft tends to deliver very incomplete products and relies on patches, hot fixes and service packs to complete their products. In fact, the problem is so rife that many of us in the world of IT refuse to consider upgrading a Microsoft product until at least the first service pack and sometimes even beyond that. Consider the lackluster corporate sales of their latest OS - Vista - and the lack of a viable SP1.
February 29th, 2008 at 11:47 am
So, how’s this different from Google Sky?
February 29th, 2008 at 12:24 pm
WWT will be free of charge.
Personally I think it is hyped. You will need XP or Vista with IE.
February 29th, 2008 at 12:25 pm
I don’t understand. I went to http://thetedlabsdownsairs.com - but it just gievs me an unresolved page.
He DID say “I encourage everyone to have a look at “the TED labs downstairs” - right?
This might be nice - on our multi-touch monitors and 3-D screens, or when we can run a Micro$oft product that doesn’t crash every few minutes.
JC
February 29th, 2008 at 12:25 pm
@ Kullat Nunu
When Google Sky doesn’t work, it doesn’t take the whole Universe with it.
February 29th, 2008 at 12:30 pm
Wonder if there’s any way to consolidate images from this, such as to obtain a long base line look at stellar objects?
GAry 7
February 29th, 2008 at 1:01 pm
Phil,
I worked with and on the Virtual Observatory Project, notably the VOEvent project. The VO is very much alive and functioning and looking at linking astronomical data world wide. There are VO groups at major academic and government institutions (NOAO, Los Alamos, CalTech, UC Berkeley, ESA, Univ. of Goettigen, etc.) all over the world.
Here is the official link : www.ivoa.org
February 29th, 2008 at 1:06 pm
I just hope that it will encourage kids to go outside and look at the night sky with their own eyes, rather than say “why should I bother, when I can just look at in on the computer”. (And, hopefully, not be disappointed when their telescope doesn’t measure up to, say, images from Hubble.)
[Insert obligatory Microsoft joke here.]
February 29th, 2008 at 2:23 pm
Ok, but how is this different from Celestia, really?
February 29th, 2008 at 4:26 pm
@ Gary;
As far as I know VLBA relies on very accurate clocks. Try doing it with a windoze box…
February 29th, 2008 at 4:34 pm
Whiney comments about Microsoft are getting old.
February 29th, 2008 at 4:53 pm
JackC, gotta ask, when was the last time you had a Microsoft consumer grade product (non-server) crash? I’d BSODed XP and Vista a few times, but you know what? Every single time (like 5 altogether) I was running Civilization 4 or one of the expansions. In other words, I was running a poorly coded 3rd Party Application.
Windows XP and Vista are as stable, or perhaps more stable, than the Apple OS (though the interface isn’t as nice). But you can’t run many 3rd party applications on Apple machines, and all the (very expensive) hardware is built by Apple. Windows on the otherhand is a sandbox OS. Unless you have MSOffice and the handful of other MS apps, everything you run is 3rd party. And all the hardware is third party too.
There are a lot of reasons to hate Microsoft, but the fact that a poorly coded 3rd party app occasionally (very occasionally) crashes the OS isn’t one of them.
February 29th, 2008 at 5:26 pm
Ugh, I could hear that first speaker’s cottonmouth :6 Oh, get a glass of water!
I think this is a great idea. I certainly hope they include a search function. The way they displayed it, it looked more like you had to pan to where the object was and then zoom in; of course, you’d need to know the location of what you’re looking at for that. I wouldn’t know where to point and zoom for the Hubble Deep Field or the Sombrero Galaxy, though I recognize them when they put them up. I only hope that this works better than some of MS’s other projects. >_>
February 29th, 2008 at 5:48 pm
A Mac is just a PC with a fancy case and different marketing.
Apple doesn’t make all that much of their PCs any more. Most of the hardware on Macs is now the same stuff that PC manufacturers use. Certainly the CPUs, most motherboard components, video cards, and hard drives are generic. Apple uses only a subset of components from the much broader PC hardware market, so doesn’t have to deal with as wide a variety of integration problems, but that doesn’t give them all that much advantage reliability-wise.
Similarly, most of OS/X is generic too (and artificially tied to Apple hardware; it’d run on most PCs just fine, and some people have done so ).
February 29th, 2008 at 6:55 pm
Oh, my Deity! It’s the Total Perspective Vortex!
J/P=?
March 1st, 2008 at 6:20 am
The software Stellarium uses something like that. Just that the objects are limited to Messier objects. And, it’s a freeware.
March 1st, 2008 at 9:20 am
“A Mac is just a PC with a fancy case and different marketing.”
There’s a saying: the software is the computer.
Microsoft builds good operating systems, and they usually work fine for people. Their application suite is very good too. I will say that first, just to be clear. But their operating systems and their base designs are very flawed for usage in today’s modern always-on interconnected world.
Why? Because Microsoft by design trusts too many processes and applications with unfettered access to the heart of the computer, the kernel. The kernel is for all intents and purposes the operating system. The interface, in Microsoft’s case explorer.exe is just a program running atop it. By allowing kernel access to so many applications, it allows malware easy access to do as it pleases. And that’s why Windows, even Vista, is so easily hacked.
OS/X, on the other hand, has a UNIX background and is, in fact, a derivative of the forty year old UNIX system that has run everything from spacecraft to mainframes. It does not easily allow applications to access the kernel and in fact runs almost all applications in user-mode without full privileges. I am not saying it is perfect, but it is better. Mac users simply do not face the same security challenges that PC users do for that simple reason.
One thing that people say is that if Apple were more popular they would be hacked as easily as Windows. Wrong. The core design makes it harder. And since over 1/2 of the net’s web servers use a variant of the same OS that Apple employs, experience does not bear this out.
I use and support both platforms, as well as other flavors on Unix (Solaris, Linux and BSD) and each have their place and good points and bad. But when a user asks me what he should consider purchasing for home to write letters, surf the Internet and do his taxes, I tell them Apple, because they are more reliable and safer. The premium price of Apples is saved in time and money not spent on securing the machine.
March 1st, 2008 at 11:20 am
It is said that it wouldn’t work with Linux. Google Sky does. End of story.
March 1st, 2008 at 1:02 pm
“mega-unber-geek” Hah? Please translate.
March 1st, 2008 at 4:45 pm
> It’ll probably crash your computer
It did crash - and deeply so - a Microsoft developper’s computer indeed while he was demonstrating an earlier version of the software at the Communicating Astronomy with the Public conference in Athens last October - but when it ran again, I was quite impressed by the smooth GUI. Let’s wait for the public release, though …
March 1st, 2008 at 4:55 pm
Re: “Microsoft builds good operating systems”; Something that takes five minutes to boot (only three months after a fresh install) is not a good operating system.
Also, I recently bought my first Apple, and I found that they are not that much more expensive than the big PC brands.
March 2nd, 2008 at 10:06 am
It is difficult to say whether you could consider Os X is a “derivative” of Unix. It is based on the Darwin Kernel, which itself is based on the Mach kernel, which itself was designed as a replacement for BSD. These are considered “Unix-like” in that they behave in a similar manner to and have design features based on Unix (to varying extents) even though (as near as I can tell) they do not contain any actual Unix code. Linux, the other most popular Unix-like kernel, is similar in that it is designed to operate in a manner similar to (but not identical to) Unix without having any actual Unix code. Solaris is similar as well, while BSD does actually have Unix code in it (although it is not all of its code and it is not identical to Unix either). None of these operating system are identical to Unix or to each other either in their code or in their implementation.
I really wouldn’t say they are “variants” of Unix or “derivatives” of Unix but rather kernels that are more or less loosely based on the principles behind Unix. You cannot, for instance, take a program from Linux and run it on Os X (or OpenSolaris, Unix, BSD, etc). It is not just a matter of recompiling, there has to be specific changes to take into account fundamental differences between the kernels. On the other hand, assuming you have the right libraries and kernel parameters, a program written for Red Hat Linux will run (maybe needing recompiling) on Debian Linux, for instance. Many (but not all) programs compiled on Debian will run without even recompiling on Ubuntu Linux (which is truly a derivative of Debian).
So I think it would be best to say that these or a series of kernels based on the same general principles, and using varying amounts of some more specific principles (and that use the same syntax for commandline). Trying to somehow say that Os X is equivalent to Linux, Solaris, BSD, and other popular kernels used for servers is not really accurate. There are reasons people don’t use Os X for servers but do use other commercial unix-like operating systems.
In fact to be unix-like it doesn’t even have to be a kernel or os. You can even make windows unix-like by using cygwin, which allows you to use unix software that is compiled to run on it. It isn’t an emulator, it is just an implementation of the components necessary to make windows unix-compatible.
March 2nd, 2008 at 10:08 am
How did you manage that? No matter how screwed up I got windows it never got took more than 2 or 3 minutes to boot, and that was usually cut down to 30 seconds to a minute by shutting down unnecessary auto-start software..
March 2nd, 2008 at 5:51 pm
Sounds like some Frippertronics playing in the background, maybe some reusage of the sounds Fripp created for Microsoft’s Vista?
March 6th, 2008 at 6:23 pm
Hey guys, the topic of this entry isn’t “Microsoft Windows, discuss.”
March 11th, 2008 at 6:29 pm
How is this different from Celestia some of you ask? Well, watch the damn video then and you will know. Plus all this MS bashing is damn annoying you narrow minded people. How about this, think of this product as some new product from a company you don’t know. It will make you happier and more open minded.
April 15th, 2008 at 12:32 am
First was wikisky, then googlesky, now ms-sky. What’s the rush out there? New race to space?
May 15th, 2008 at 2:48 am
I’ve just completed the installation of World Wide Telescope and rebooted ready to try it - it CRASHED straight away - exactly as you would expect from any Microsoft product. I think MS DOS was the only stable program they made..!
Well, when it’s finally got working, perhaps it can be modified so we can fly spacecraft around this new virtual world with an assortment of laser weaponary, shields, ECM, missiles, hyperdrive, etc. just like the original computer game “Elite” for the Acorn BBC Micro. Those were the days. But can we have a minigun fitted this time please?!