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

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# The Universe Project becomes WorldWide Telescope  The Worldwide Telescope was started by amateur astronomer Curtis Wong who grew up in Los Angeles with a deep desire to explore the beautiful night Sky he saw in magazines like Sky and Telescope. Of course between the city lights and the smog, all he could see with his 60mm refractor were the moon, a few planets and nebulae. What he really wanted was a gigantic telescope with a dark sky and a Harvard astronomer by his side to guide and explain what he was looking at.   When he grew up,  Wong became interactive media producer creating some of the first CD-ROM’s CD-ROMs,  such as Multimedia Beethoven in 1991. He started a new CD-ROM project called John Dobson’s Universe with guided tours by Dobson explaining deep sky objects in the context of a zoomable night sky featuring the beautiful constellation imagery of Akira Fuji and object imagery from multiple sources. Unfortunately funding for that project got cancelled but Wong continued to think about how it could be done with the emergence of the World Wide Web. By 2000, Wong was at Microsoft Research where he worked with big data computer scientist Jim Gray and astronomer Alex Szalay from Johns Hopkins. Gray and Szalay were working on software to make data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey available on-demand to researchers and the public and wrote a seminal paper on it called "The World-Wide Telescope, an Archetype for Online Science" [http://arxiv.org/ftp/cs/papers/0403/0403018.pdf]. In working with Gray and Szalay on that software, Wong realized that all the elements were finally becoming available to create his astronomy project, then code-named "The Universe Project."