Look out Google Sky. Here comes The WorldWide Telescope. Here is the description from the WorldWide Telescope home page:

The WorldWide Telescope (WWT) is a rich visualization environment that functions as a virtual telescope, bringing together imagery from the best ground and space telescopes in the world for a seamless, guided exploration of the universe.

WorldWide Telescope, created with Microsoft’s high-performance Visual Experience Engine™, enables seamless panning and zooming across the night sky blending terabytes of images, data, and stories from multiple sources over the Internet into a media-rich, immersive experience.

And here is the reaction from Dr. Roy Gould of the Harvard Center for Astrophysics:

“The WorldWide Telescope takes the best images from the greatest telescopes on Earth … and in space … and assembles them into a seamless, holistic view of the universe. This new resource will change the way we do astronomy … the way we teach astronomy … and, most importantly, I think it’s going to change the way we see ourselves in the universe.”

The WorldWide Telescope will be available free of charge to anyone with a computer in spring of 2008. Coming soon to a computer screen near you!

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