Monica Young edited The Universe Project.md  over 9 years ago

Commit id: 43fb88bfb7297d3705610a0f3ed32fcb25aeefce

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# The Universe Project becomes Building the  WorldWide Telescope Amateur astronomer Curtis Wong grew up in Los Angeles with a deep desire to explore the amazing sky he saw in magazines like _Sky & Telescope_. But between the city lights and the smog, all he could see with his 60mm refractor were the moon, a few planets, and some nebulae. What he really wanted was a gigantic telescope under a dark sky, and an astronomer by his side to explain what he was seeing.   In 2000 Wong was working at Microsoft Research with big data computer scientist Jim Gray and astronomer Alex Szalay (Johns Hopkins University), who were creating software to make Sloan Digital Sky Survey data available to researchers and the general public. Gray and Szalay wrote a seminal paper envisioning _"The World-Wide Telescope, an Archetype for Online Science"_, and Wong realized that all the elements were there to realize his childhood dream.