Techno-News Blog

June 25, 2012

A Virtual Telescope Turns Back toward Earth

Filed under: Uncategorized — admin @ 12:15 am

by CONOR MYHRVOLD, Technology Review

A plug-in for WorldWide Telescope lets curious users explore the home planet. WorldWide Telescope is a free piece of software that lets people take a virtual tour through the far-flung corners of outer space. It also helps astronomers share scientific data on cosmological phenomena. Now a new plug-in is turning that virtual telescope back toward Earth. WorldWide Telescope can be downloaded or used in a Web browser. Click on a galaxy or star cluster, and you’ll see properties such as the spectral data and wavelengths emitted by the celestial object in question, in addition to relevant peer-reviewed articles and Wikipedia entries. “Objects in the sky become the hyperlinks themselves,” says Harvard astronomy professor Alyssa Goodman, who has been an active user of the technology since it was unveiled to the public at a TEDx conference in 2008.

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/428219/a-virtual-telescope-turns-back-toward-earth/

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