Alyssa Goodman edited WWT Everywhere.md  almost 10 years ago

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# Multi-Wavelength, Multi-Platform, Multi-Device, Multi-Screen  Today, amateur astronomers are blessed with a wide variety of software tools, running on a variety of devices, tools  that show what the Sky and/or Solar System will look like at any point in time, from any location. Like other such "planeterium" software, WorldWide Telescope offers an astrometrically correct 3D model of the Universe populated by the highest resolution imagery from ground and space based telescopes. But, WWT's imagery is unique in its quality, and in its ability to show the sky at many (currently 85!) different wavelengths, most of which are beyond the spectral window of the human eye. WWT 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. Users can also cross-fade between any two wavelengths, selected from images, many of which are all-sky, covering the full Radio to X-Ray spectrum. The companion Tour for this article [link] demonstrates these features [refer reader to filmstrip-style illustration of that, below].  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 500k+ objects 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 from multiple sources on the Web.