A service free of charge from Microsoft lets students and lifelong learners
tour the night sky using high-resolution images from the world's best land-
and space-based telescopes.
REDMOND, Wash., May 13 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- The final frontier got
a bit closer today as Microsoft Corp. officially launched the public beta
of its WorldWide Telescope, which is now available at
http://www.worldwidetelescope.org. WorldWide Telescope is a rich Web
application that brings together imagery from the best ground- and
space-based observatories across the world to allow people to easily
explore the night sky through their computers. WorldWide Telescope has been
eagerly anticipated by the astronomical and educational communities as a
compelling astronomical resource for students and lifelong learners, and as
a way to make science fun for children.
(Logo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20000822/MSFTLOGO)
"The WorldWide Telescope is a powerful tool for science and education
that makes it possible for everyone to explore the universe," said Bill
Gates, chairman of Microsoft. "By combining terabytes of incredible imagery
and data with easy-to-use software for viewing and moving through all that
information, the WorldWide Telescope opens the door to new ways to see and
experience the wonders of space. Our hope is that it will inspire young
people to explore astronomy and science, and help researchers in their
quest to better understand the universe."
The application itself is a blend of software and Web 2.0 services
created with the Microsoft high-performance Visual Experience Engine, which
allows seamless panning and zooming around the heavens with rich image
environments. WorldWide Telescope stitches together terabytes of
high-resolution images of celestial bodies and displays them in a way that
relates to their actual position in the sky. People can freely browse
through the solar system, galaxy and beyond, or take advantage of a growing
number of guided tours of the sky hosted by astronomers and educators at
major universities and planetariums.
"WorldWide Telescope brings to life a dream that many of us in
Microsoft Research have pursued for years, and we are proud to release this
as a free service to anyone who wants to explore the universe," said Curtis
Wong, manager of Microsoft's Next Media Research Group. "Where is Saturn in
the sky, in relation to the moon? Does the Milky Way really have a
supermassive black hole in the center of the galaxy? With the universe at
your fingertips, you can discover the answers for yourself."
The service goes well beyond the simple browsing of images. Users can
choose which telescope they want to look through, including the Hubble
Space Telescope, the Chandra X-Ray Observatory Center, the Spitzer Space
Telescope or others. They can view the locations of planets in the night
sky -- in the past, present or future. They can view the universe through
different wavelengths of light to reveal hidden structures in other parts
of the galaxy. Taken as a whole, the application provides a top-to-bottom
view of the science of astronomy.
"Users can see the X-ray view of the sky, zoom into bright radiation
clouds, and then cross-fade into the visible light view and discover the
cloud remnants of a supernova explosion from a thousand years ago," said
Roy Gould, a researcher at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
"I believe this new creation from Microsoft will have a profound impact on
the way we view the universe."
Microsoft Research has formed close ties with members of the academic,
education and scientific communities to make WorldWide Telescope a reality.
NASA along with other organizations coordinated with Microsoft Research to
provide the imagery, provide feedback on the application from a scientific
point of view, and help turn WorldWide Telescope into a rich learning
application.
Microsoft's mission to make the universe accessible to everyone was
begun years ago by renowned Microsoft Senior Researcher Jim Gray. WorldWide
Telescope is built on top of Gray's pioneering development of large-scale,
high-performance online databases including SkyServer and his contributions
to the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, a project to map a large part of the
Northern sky outside of the galaxy. Microsoft Research is releasing
WorldWide Telescope as a service free of charge to the astronomy and
education communities as a tribute to Gray with the hope that it will
inspire and empower kids of all ages to explore and understand the universe
in an unprecedented way.
About Microsoft Research
Founded in 1991, Microsoft Research is dedicated to conducting both
basic and applied research in computer science and software engineering.
Its goals are to enhance the user experience on computing devices, reduce
the cost of writing and maintaining software, and invent novel computing
technologies. Researchers focus on more than 55 areas of computing and
collaborate with leading academic, government and industry researchers to
advance the state of the art in such areas as graphics, speech recognition,
user-interface research, natural language processing, programming tools and
methodologies, operating systems and networking, and the mathematical
sciences. Microsoft Research currently employs more than 800 people in six
labs located in Redmond, Wash.; Cambridge, Mass.; Silicon Valley, Calif.;
Cambridge, England; Beijing, China; and Bangalore, India. Microsoft
Research collaborates openly with colleges and universities worldwide to
enhance the teaching and learning experience, inspire technological
innovation, and broadly advance the field of computer science. More
information can be found at http://www.research.microsoft.com.
About Microsoft
Founded in 1975, Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) is the worldwide leader in
software, services and solutions that help people and businesses realize
their full potential.
WorldWide Telescope Partners Community
Microsoft Research would like to take this opportunity to acknowledge
the following organizations that provided images, guided tours and their
expertise to make WorldWide Telescope and the universe available to
explorers of all ages.
Adler Planetarium
Doug Roberts, director of the Adler Space Visualization Laboratory
(SVL), created the tour "Center of the Milky Way Galaxy" based on his radio
data research for the WorldWide Telescope. This tour, and other future
tours, will first be available in the SVL and then in the CyberSpace
Gallery. Visitors to Adler will be able to access WorldWide Telescope at
kiosks set up in the SVL. WorldWide Telescope also will be incorporated
into select "Astronomy Conversations," daily conversations with Adler
astronomers, which take place Monday to Friday from 2 p.m. to 3 p.m. in the
SVL.
WorldWide Telescope "has the possibility of being transformative in the
way we educate people and get them to become familiar with and excited
about astronomy."
- Lucy Fortson, Vice President for Research, Adler Planetarium and
Astronomy Museum, and Senior Research Associate, Department of Astronomy
and Astrophysics, University of Chicago
California Institute of Technology
WorldWide Telescope is "a beautiful platform for explaining and getting
people excited about astronomy, and I think the professional astronomers
will come to use it as well."
- Roy Williams, Senior Scientist, California Institute of Technology
"The WorldWide Telescope is going to be a fantastic outreach platform
for astronomy and perhaps even applied computing and information science."
- George Djorgovski, Professor of Astronomy and Faculty Director, Center
for Advanced Computing Research, California Institute of Technology
Chandra X-ray Observatory
The Chandra X-ray Observatory, NASA's flagship X-ray telescope and part
of its "Great Observatories" program, has contributed about 30 images to
the WorldWide Telescope. These include not only images that contain X-ray
data but also others that are multiwavelength composites of different types
of radiation. In addition, staff members at Chandra have provided video and
narration for six tours on galaxies and supernovas and their remnants.
Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
Researchers and educators at Harvard have been excited to be working
with Microsoft on many aspects of WorldWide Telescope. In addition to
consulting on WorldWide Telescope features and data sets, Alyssa Goodman,
professor of astronomy and founding director of Harvard's Initiative in
Innovative Computing, created a tour called "Dust & Us." She and Curtis
Wong are also collaborating with WGBH to explore how to utilize WorldWide
Telescope for education in a variety of media over the coming year. Roy
Gould, a noted education researcher in the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for
Astrophysics' Science Education Group, has been working with Wong to hone
the WorldWide Telescope's educational approach. Gould also presented the
technical preview of WorldWide Telescope at the 2008 TED conference.
"WorldWide Telescope has enough capability that even professional
astronomers and astrophysicists are eager to use it, not just as a
mechanism for public outreach, but for our own work."
- Alyssa Goodman, Professor of Astronomy, Director of the Initiative in
Innovative Computing, Harvard University
"The beauty of the WorldWide Telescope is that it enables us to
seamlessly connect the world of learning that takes place in a science
museum with the learning that can take place at home over the Web, with
this much larger access to the whole world of astronomy."
- Roy Gould, Director, NASA Smithsonian Universe Education Forum,
Science
Education Department, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
"I see the WorldWide Telescope as having an important educational
mission. ... The WorldWide Telescope gives somebody a kind of freedom to
follow their imagination."
- Robert Kirshner, Professor of Astronomy, Harvard University
Hewlett Foundation
The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation has agreed to partner with
Microsoft Corp. to design an educational strategy for the WorldWide
Telescope. The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation has been making grants
since 1967 to help solve social and environmental problems at home and
around the world. The foundation concentrates its resources on activities
in education, the environment, global development, performing arts,
philanthropy and population, and makes grants to support disadvantaged
communities in the San Francisco Bay Area.
"This puts not the world but the universe at a student's fingertips,
and challenges them to explore. It's simply an amazing tool. We envision
open-ended curricula that encourage the student in everyone."
- Catherine Casserly, Director of the Open Educational Resources
Initiative, Hewlett Foundation
Johns Hopkins University
Alexander Szalay, Alumni Centennial Professor of astronomy in the Henry
A. Rowland Department of Physics and Astronomy and professor of computer
science at the Johns Hopkins University, worked with renowned Microsoft
Senior Researcher Jim Gray on the development of large-scale,
high-performance online databases such as SkyServer and the Sloan Digital
Sky Survey. In addition, Szalay's group at Johns Hopkins built the
multiterabyte archive for the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (known as the Cosmic
Genome Project) and played a major role in the National Virtual
Observatory, an alliance to construct a system connecting all astronomy
data in the world.
"The WorldWide Telescope is a wonderful demonstration ... the ability
to see the whole sky in context. And it gives you an appreciation of how
big the universe really is."
- Alex Szalay, Professor of Physics, the Johns Hopkins University
"WorldWide Telescope will allow people to start by looking at the sky
that they experience and zoom in to a single scientific result. WorldWide
Telescope is a way of making that connection in a way that's never been
made before."
- Jordan Raddick, Science Education and Outreach Coordinator, the Johns
Hopkins University
NASA
NASA coordinated with Microsoft to make images from its portfolio of
astronomical and planetary content available through WorldWide Telescope,
including images from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, NASA's Spitzer Space
Telescope and NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory.
"The WorldWide Telescope is a great example of a piece of educational
software that's been designed intelligently from the ground up. And it is
the most impressive one I've seen to date to handle the visualization of
the sky in a very interactive, smooth, clean interface."
- Robert Hurt, Astronomer, NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, California
Institute of Technology
WGBH Boston
WGBH Boston, the single largest producer of PBS prime-time, children's
and online programming, and a pioneer in educational multimedia and media
access technologies, is collaborating with Microsoft to develop engaging
online content using the WorldWide Telescope technology. WGBH's NOVA is
working with Microsoft to develop an interactive online tour that will use
the WorldWide Telescope to navigate science and technology content from
NOVA broadcasts and Web site content. The WGBH kids program Fetch! is
exploring the possibility of a segment where an episode's challenge uses
the WorldWide Telescope. In addition, WGBH's Teachers' Domain is looking at
ways to create an online tour for educators and students to use the
WorldWide Telescope.
"WorldWide Telescope really seems to be opening a door for everyone to
explore and connect with the heavens ... exploring stories that they don't
even know are available to them."
- Jonathan C. Abbott, President and Chief Executive Officer, WGBH
Educational Foundation
Griffith Observatory and Space Telescope Science Institute (STSCI) also
are WorldWide Telescope partners.
Media Relations Contacts
Sarah Beck
Manager of Public Relations
Adler Planetarium
(312) 542-2424
sbeck@adlerplanetarium.org
Megan Watzke
Chandra X-ray Observatory
(617) 496-7998
mwatzke@cfa.harvard.edu
Jack Fischer
Communications Officer
William and Flora Hewlett Foundation
(650) 234-4500, ext. 5744
jfischer@hewlett.org
Lisa De Nike
Office of News and Information
The Johns Hopkins University
(443) 287-9960
lde@jhu.edu
Peter Panagopoulos
Brand Marketing Director, Children's Programming
WGBH
(617) 300-3003
peter_panagopoulos@wgbh.org
Carole McFall
Account Manager, NOVA Marketing & Communications
WBGH
(617) 300-3988
carole_mcfall@wgbh.org
SOURCE Microsoft Corp.
 back to top
Related links:
http://www.microsoft.com
Photo Notes:
NewsCom: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20000822/MSFTLOGO
AP Archive: http://photoarchive.ap.org
PRN Photo Desk, photodesk@prnewswire.com
CONTACT:
pr.mspx./ /CONTACT: Rapid Response Team of
Waggener Edstrom Worldwide, +1-503-443-7070,
rrt@waggeneredstrom.com, for Microsoft Corp.
|
