Alyssa Goodman edited History.md  almost 10 years ago

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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 runseither  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 in-depth 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 Universe by saving special paths like a virtual camera through the program. These Tours look like video with musical scores, narration, additional imagery, and hyperlinks but are dramatically different in that you can interact and explore deeper and go anywhere at any time or pick up right where you left off! Just imagine WWT as an interactive web-browser for the sky. A sky-browser of sorts. Oh, and it's free.