Worldwide Telescope
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WorldWide Telescope viewing a Hubble image of the Whirlpool Galaxy (M51)
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| Original author(s) | Jonathan Fay, Curtis Wong |
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| Developer(s) | Microsoft Research, .NET Foundation, American Astronomical Society |
| Initial release | February 27, 2008 |
| Stable release |
5.5 / June 15, 2016
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| Written in | C# |
| Operating system | Microsoft Windows; web app version available |
| Platform | .NET Framework, Web platform |
| Available in | English, Chinese, Spanish, German, Russian, Hindi |
| Type | Visualization software |
| License | MIT |
| Website | worldwidetelescope |
WorldWide Telescope (WWT) is an open source set of applications, data and cloud services, originally created by Microsoft Research but now an open source project hosted on GitHub. The .NET Foundation holds the copyright and the project is managed by the American Astronomical Society and has been supported by grants from the Moore Foundation and National Science Foundation. WWT displays astronomical, earth and planetary data allowing visual navigation through the 3-dimensional (3D) Universe. Users are able to navigate the sky by panning and zooming, or explore the 3D universe from the surface of Earth to past the Cosmic microwave background (CMB), viewing both visual imagery and scientific data (academic papers, etc.) about that area and the objects in it. Data is curated from hundreds of different data sources, but its open data nature allows users to explore any third party data that conforms to a WWT supported format. With the rich source of multi-spectral all-sky images it is possible to view the sky in many wavelengths of light. The software utilizes Microsoft's Visual Experience Engine technologies to function. WWT can also be used to visualize arbitrary or abstract data sets and time series data.
WWT is completely free and currently comes in two versions: a native application that runs under Microsoft Windows (this version can use the specialized capabilities of a computer graphics card to render up to a half million data points), and a web client based on HTML5 and WebGL. The web client uses a responsive design which allows people to use it on smart phones to desktop. The windows desktop application is high performance system which scales from a desktop to large multi-channel full dome digital planetariums.
The WWT project began in 2002, at Microsoft Research and Johns Hopkins University. Database researcher Jim Gray had developed a satellite Earth-images database (Terraserver) and wanted to apply a similar technique to organizing the many disparate astronomical databases of sky images. WWT was announced at the TED Conference in Monterey, California in February 2008. As of 2016, WWT has been downloaded by at least 10 million active users."
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