What famous observatory is more important than any other, yet has no lens, and no mirror? Is it Claudius Ptolemy's at Alexandria in the 2nd century AD? Maybe Uraniborg or Stjerneborg built by Tycho Brahe using 1% of the GDP of Denmark in the the 16th century? Nope. The answer is a creation of the 20th century: the internet.

The ever-growing wealth of astronomical data available freely online literally holds answers to the mysteries of the Universe. The WorldWide Telescope is the telescope that lets any of us view the Universe using the internet as our observatory, to puzzle out those mysteries.

The WorldWide Telescope is a "Universe Information System" that runs either online in a web browser, or in Windows, on almost any computer. It accesses the internet's amazing treasure-trove of online data to provide beautiful all-sky imagery at dozens of wavelengths, as well as detailed images of deep sky objects, and other astrophyscially important targets. In addition, it offers links to deeper information about objects, through links to diverse databases including Wikipedia and NASA's Astrophysics Data System, which holds all of the professional Astronomical literature since the 1800's. Users of WorldWide Telescope (also known as WWT) can create, share, and experience "Tours" of the Sky and of a three-dimesional model of the known Unvierse by saving special paths through the program. And those Tours can have musical scores, be narrated, conatin added imagery, and hyperlinks. Just imagine WWT as a web-browser for the sky. A sky-browser of sorts. Oh, and it's free.