Microsoft’s World Wide Telescope Provides Access “To Infinity & Beyond”

In May of 2008 Microsoft unveiled the World Wide Telescope to the public. This powerful educational tool is a free download. The World Wide Telescope uses terabytes of the best images from the Hubble Space Telescope, the Chandra X-ray Observatory and the Spitzer Infrared Space Telescope and creates high-resolution panoramas of the universe. Users can see planets, moons, constellations, comets, galaxies and many other objects in the universe. Users can move in and out to see at an object. Viewers can choose different perspectives from different locations on Earth to track the precise position of these objects in the sky. A user can look at the universe as it appeared far in the past, or as it will in the future. With the fast forward button you can watch a planet's moons spinning as they orbit the planet. You can view a supernova explosion that happened a thousand years ago. There are guided tours hosted by astronomers and interactive movies explaining these objects out in space. Users can view the universe through different wavelengths of the spectrum to reveal the various mysteries of the universe. The requirements needed to use this program on your Vista (preferred) or Windows XP Service Pack 2 computer are to download World Wide Telescope from http://www.worldwidetelescope.org/. It only runs on a Windows operating system with 2GHz or faster processor, 2GB of RAM, 1-10GB of free disk space, a Graphics card with 128 MB RAM or 256 VRAM.