Alyssa Goodman edited The Universe Project.md  almost 10 years ago

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WorldWide Telescope had its first preview at the 2008 TED Conference as introduced by Roy Gould, science education expert at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.   WorldWide Telescope is an astrometrically correct 3D model of the Universe populated by the highest resolution imagery from ground and space based telescopes. It features a seamless visible light view (based on imaging from the Digitized Sky Survey) of the night sky that is a trillion pixels in size, allowing users to zoom from a 60 degree wide field view of the Milky Way to a close up view of features as tiny as the wisps of the Veil nebula. WWT also has 85 different multispectral sky views that are all precisely registered to allow for cross fading between them. The 3D simulation of the Solar System allows you to simulate eclipses as viewed from the ground or from space. You can fly to the Moon to see the high resolution Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter imager texture mapped on a high resolution digital elevation mapped surface of the moon. Travel to Mars and you can fly through Valles Marinaras. Turn on the asteroids and you can see each of the 500,000 tracked by the NEO center. Zoom out from the solar system into the Hipparcos catalog and fly through the 100,000+ stars in our neighborhood and keep going through the million Sloan galaxies to see the large scale structure of the Universe. Right-clicking on a Sloan galaxy, like any object in WWT, will reveal deeper information on that object such as red shift, spectra, and lots of other data from multiple sources on the Web.  Anything in WWT can be included in a so-called guided tour which looks like a video with narration, music, text, graphics and hyperlinks. A tour has the distinct advantage over video in that a tour is interactive at ANY time. When paused, the user is in the environment and free to zoom closer into a detail, or switch see what that object looks like in other wavelengths, find more information or branch off on another related tour.