WORLDWIDE TELESCOPE Coming soon to a computer near you

Microsoft Corp. and leading astronomy institutions like the Adler Planetarium in Chicago on Tuesday will offer a free computer program to put the vast reaches of the cosmos at your fingertips.

And with a little luck, the software may help desktop astronomers discover parts of the universe.

Called the WorldWide Telescope, the Microsoft software tool will enable "citizen scientists to participate in research," said Doug Roberts, director of the Adler Space Visualization Laboratory. With botany, bird-watching or simply counting bugs, citizen scientists are increasingly participating in the process, he said.

An ornithologist "wants to know how many birds just flew over your house," he said. Likewise, the WorldWide Telescope is a tool that gives students, high-end amateurs and everyday stargazers the ability to see and interact with the vastness of the universe with a mouse click.
"It takes much of the complexity out of the process," Roberts said.

Looking at the stars from a computer screen is not new. In recent years, NASA has generated interest in the science thanks to the startling imagery it sent across the Internet from its Mars Rover missions. Also, free desktop programs such as Celestia have been used to browse the stars.

But what Microsoft and the nation's leading observatories, universities and planetariums are offering is a rich, interactive experience that doubles as a simple guide to the universe for beginners and a tool professionals will use to share data.

Users can choose to take a narrated tour of the universe, view the stars through the Hubble Space Telescope and see the universe through different wavelengths of light, as professionals do.

There also is a tool to send an e-mail of an image or an anomaly to a professional astronomer such as Roberts.

"This is like Facebook for astronomers," Roberts said. "At least that's what Microsoft wants it to be. It will depend on how people use this."

Everyday astronomers can create tours using the WorldWide Telescope and share that with other users. At launch, more than 12 terabytes of data and imagery on the universe can be accessed through the 20 megabyte desktop download, said Curtis Wong, manager of Microsoft's Next Media Research Group.

Wong's team at Microsoft developed the program.

As new data gets added from the participating sources, including NASA, the Hubble Space Telescope and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, amateur and professional astronomers will have the same access.

"A professional astronomer doesn't look at all of this data," Roberts said, in part because there is so much data to view. "So the public could be the first to find something" of interest. An amateur could look at data from a new survey and notice an anomaly that didn't exist in an earlier survey, for example.

"It could be an exploding star," Roberts said.

The free desktop download is available at www.worldwidetelescope.org. In a brief test from an office computer running Windows XP software, it downloaded in minutes. It works on computers running XP and Vista.

Wong said the real value to the program is the interactive tours users can take and create of the cosmos.

"All of us wished at some point, as we were looking at the Milky Way, that we had someone there to tell us a story," he said. "That's really what this is, having those stories within the context of the sky."

Those guided tours are interactive and users can stop at a moment to explore the details of a particular point of interest. That's one of the key differences between the WorldWide Telescope and some of the other astronomy programs available to computer users.

Roberts built one of the first tours; it's his voice narrating a guided trip to the center of the Milky Way.

"I can drive a real-time program with a timed audio soundtrack," he said. "I can put text in, too, if I want. It's a narrative-driven approach."

But what really excites Roberts, also an educator at Northwestern University, is the program's ability to teach.

The Adler Planetarium, for instance, offers a daily space visualization program where visitors can ask professional astronomers questions about what they do and how they do it. Now, Adler's astronomers can incorporate the WorldWide Telescope into the program.

That means "you can see a professional astronomer using this software and then go home and do it yourself. It's the same interface," Roberts said. "You will have a very powerful experience at home.

"Kids will love to play with this and the high-end amateurs will also find it incredibly useful."