WorldWide Telescope

WorldWide Telescope is a visualization environment that enables a computer to function as a virtual telescope — bringing together archival imagery from the world's best ground- and space-based telescopes for the exploration of the Universe. WorldWide Telescope blends petabytes of images, information, and stories from multiple sources into a seamless, immersive, rich media experience. WorldWide Telescope allows simple and direct access to observations of celestial objects and all sky surveys over the full range of the electromagnetic spectrum. It brings together many impressive archives of celestial objects – collections painstakingly constructed from observations by such instruments as the Hubble Space Telescope, the Chandra X-Ray Observatory, the Spitzer Space Telescope, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), the Two Micron All Sky Survey (2MASS), Planck, and many others while providing easy integration for other archival data sources as well as observations yet to be made. In addition, it presents a 3D model of the Universe with detailed imagery of planetary surfaces and a representative model of the Milky Way as well as the distribution of galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey.

The data in WorldWide Telescope are not only readily accessible; they are presented in a form that facilitates integrative research, thereby helping to bridge the gap between cutting-edge research, education, and public understanding. WorldWide Telescope represents a major step toward the democratization of science, and it has turned the Internet into "the world´s best telescope" — a veritable supercomputer at your desktop while also enabling most of that functionality in a web client version.