REDMOND, Wash. (Map) - REDMOND, Wash., May 13 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- The final frontier got a bit closer today as Microsoft Corp. officially launched the public beta of its WorldWide Telescope, which is now available at http://www.worldwidetelescope.org. WorldWide Telescope is a rich Web application that brings together imagery from the best ground- and space-based observatories across the world to allow people to easily explore the night sky through their computers. WorldWide Telescope has been eagerly anticipated by the astronomical and educational communities as a compelling astronomical resource for students and lifelong learners, and as a way to make science fun for children.

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"The WorldWide Telescope is a powerful tool for science and education that makes it possible for everyone to explore the universe," said Bill Gates, chairman of Microsoft. "By combining terabytes of incredible imagery and data with easy-to-use software for viewing and moving through all that information, the WorldWide Telescope opens the door to new ways to see and experience the wonders of space. Our hope is that it will inspire young people to explore astronomy and science, and help researchers in their quest to better understand the universe."

The application itself is a blend of software and Web 2.0 services created with the Microsoft high-performance Visual Experience Engine, which allows seamless panning and zooming around the heavens with rich image environments. WorldWide Telescope stitches together terabytes of high-resolution images of celestial bodies and displays them in a way that relates to their actual position in the sky. People can freely browse through the solar system, galaxy and beyond, or take advantage of a growing number of guided tours of the sky hosted by astronomers and educators at major universities and planetariums.

"WorldWide Telescope brings to life a dream that many of us in Microsoft Research have pursued for years, and we are proud to release this as a free service to anyone who wants to explore the universe," said Curtis Wong, manager of Microsoft's Next Media Research Group. "Where is Saturn in the sky, in relation to the moon? Does the Milky Way really have a supermassive black hole in the center of the galaxy? With the universe at your fingertips, you can discover the answers for yourself."

The service goes well beyond the simple browsing of images. Users can choose which telescope they want to look through, including the Hubble Space Telescope, the Chandra X-Ray Observatory Center, the Spitzer Space Telescope or others. They can view the locations of planets in the night sky -- in the past, present or future. They can view the universe through different wavelengths of light to reveal hidden structures in other parts of the galaxy. Taken as a whole, the application provides a top-to-bottom view of the science of astronomy.

"Users can see the X-ray view of the sky, zoom into bright radiation clouds, and then cross-fade into the visible light view and discover the cloud remnants of a supernova explosion from a thousand years ago," said Roy Gould, a researcher at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. "I believe this new creation from Microsoft will have a profound impact on the way we view the universe."

Microsoft Research has formed close ties with members of the academic, education and scientific communities to make WorldWide Telescope a reality. NASA along with other organizations coordinated with Microsoft Research to provide the imagery, provide feedback on the application from a scientific point of view, and help turn WorldWide Telescope into a rich learning application.

Microsoft's mission to make the universe accessible to everyone was begun years ago by renowned Microsoft Senior Researcher Jim Gray. WorldWide Telescope is built on top of Gray's pioneering development of large-scale, high-performance online databases including SkyServer and his contributions to the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, a project to map a large part of the Northern sky outside of the galaxy. Microsoft Research is releasing WorldWide Telescope as a service free of charge to the astronomy and education communities as a tribute to Gray with the hope that it will inspire and empower kids of all ages to explore and understand the universe in an unprecedented way.

About Microsoft Research

Founded in 1991, Microsoft Research is dedicated to conducting both basic and applied research in computer science and software engineering. Its goals are to enhance the user experience on computing devices, reduce the cost of writing and maintaining software, and invent novel computing technologies. Researchers focus on more than 55 areas of computing and collaborate with leading academic, government and industry researchers to advance the state of the art in such areas as graphics, speech recognition, user-interface research, natural language processing, programming tools and methodologies, operating systems and networking, and the mathematical sciences. Microsoft Research currently employs more than 800 people in six labs located in Redmond, Wash.; Cambridge, Mass.; Silicon Valley, Calif.; Cambridge, England; Beijing, China; and Bangalore, India. Microsoft Research collaborates openly with colleges and universities worldwide to enhance the teaching and learning experience, inspire technological innovation, and broadly advance the field of computer science. More information can be found at http://www.research.microsoft.com.

About Microsoft

Founded in 1975, Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) is the worldwide leader in software, services and solutions that help people and businesses realize their full potential.

WorldWide Telescope Partners Community

Microsoft Research would like to take this opportunity to acknowledge the following organizations that provided images, guided tours and their expertise to make WorldWide Telescope and the universe available to explorers of all ages.

Adler Planetarium

Doug Roberts, director of the Adler Space Visualization Laboratory (SVL), created the tour "Center of the Milky Way Galaxy" based on his radio data research for the WorldWide Telescope. This tour, and other future tours, will first be available in the SVL and then in the CyberSpace Gallery. Visitors to Adler will be able to access WorldWide Telescope at kiosks set up in the SVL. WorldWide Telescope also will be incorporated into select "Astronomy Conversations," daily conversations with Adler astronomers, which take place Monday to Friday from 2 p.m. to 3 p.m. in the SVL.

WorldWide Telescope "has the possibility of being transformative in the way we educate people and get them to become familiar with and excited about astronomy."

    - Lucy Fortson, Vice President for Research, Adler Planetarium and
      Astronomy Museum, and Senior Research Associate, Department of Astronomy
      and Astrophysics, University of Chicago

California Institute of Technology

WorldWide Telescope is "a beautiful platform for explaining and getting people excited about astronomy, and I think the professional astronomers will come to use it as well."

- Roy Williams, Senior Scientist, California Institute of Technology

"The WorldWide Telescope is going to be a fantastic outreach platform for astronomy and perhaps even applied computing and information science."

    - George Djorgovski, Professor of Astronomy and Faculty Director, Center
      for Advanced Computing Research, California Institute of Technology

Chandra X-ray Observatory

The Chandra X-ray Observatory, NASA's flagship X-ray telescope and part of its "Great Observatories" program, has contributed about 30 images to the WorldWide Telescope. These include not only images that contain X-ray data but also others that are multiwavelength composites of different types of radiation. In addition, staff members at Chandra have provided video and narration for six tours on galaxies and supernovas and their remnants.

Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics

Researchers and educators at Harvard have been excited to be working with Microsoft on many aspects of WorldWide Telescope. In addition to consulting on WorldWide Telescope features and data sets, Alyssa Goodman, professor of astronomy and founding director of Harvard's Initiative in Innovative Computing, created a tour called "Dust & Us." She and Curtis Wong are also collaborating with WGBH to explore how to utilize WorldWide Telescope for education in a variety of media over the coming year. Roy Gould, a noted education researcher in the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics' Science Education Group, has been working with Wong to hone the WorldWide Telescope's educational approach. Gould also presented the technical preview of WorldWide Telescope at the 2008 TED conference.

"WorldWide Telescope has enough capability that even professional astronomers and astrophysicists are eager to use it, not just as a mechanism for public outreach, but for our own work."

- Alyssa Goodman, Professor of Astronomy, Director of the Initiative in

Innovative Computing, Harvard University

"The beauty of the WorldWide Telescope is that it enables us to seamlessly connect the world of learning that takes place in a science museum with the learning that can take place at home over the Web, with this much larger access to the whole world of astronomy."

- Roy Gould, Director, NASA Smithsonian Universe Education Forum, Science

Education Department, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics

"I see the WorldWide Telescope as having an important educational mission. ... The WorldWide Telescope gives somebody a kind of freedom to follow their imagination."

- Robert Kirshner, Professor of Astronomy, Harvard University

Hewlett Foundation

The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation has agreed to partner with Microsoft Corp. to design an educational strategy for the WorldWide Telescope. The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation has been making grants since 1967 to help solve social and environmental problems at home and around the world. The foundation concentrates its resources on activities in education, the environment, global development, performing arts, philanthropy and population, and makes grants to support disadvantaged communities in the San Francisco Bay Area.

"This puts not the world but the universe at a student's fingertips, and challenges them to explore. It's simply an amazing tool. We envision open-ended curricula that encourage the student in everyone."

    - Catherine Casserly, Director of the Open Educational Resources
      Initiative, Hewlett Foundation

Johns Hopkins University

Alexander Szalay, Alumni Centennial Professor of astronomy in the Henry A. Rowland Department of Physics and Astronomy and professor of computer science at the Johns Hopkins University, worked with renowned Microsoft Senior Researcher Jim Gray on the development of large-scale, high-performance online databases such as SkyServer and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. In addition, Szalay's group at Johns Hopkins built the multiterabyte archive for the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (known as the Cosmic Genome Project) and played a major role in the National Virtual Observatory, an alliance to construct a system connecting all astronomy data in the world.

"The WorldWide Telescope is a wonderful demonstration ... the ability to see the whole sky in context. And it gives you an appreciation of how big the universe really is."

- Alex Szalay, Professor of Physics, the Johns Hopkins University

"WorldWide Telescope will allow people to start by looking at the sky that they experience and zoom in to a single scientific result. WorldWide Telescope is a way of making that connection in a way that's never been made before."

    - Jordan Raddick, Science Education and Outreach Coordinator, the Johns
      Hopkins University

NASA

NASA coordinated with Microsoft to make images from its portfolio of astronomical and planetary content available through WorldWide Telescope, including images from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope and NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory.

"The WorldWide Telescope is a great example of a piece of educational software that's been designed intelligently from the ground up. And it is the most impressive one I've seen to date to handle the visualization of the sky in a very interactive, smooth, clean interface."

    - Robert Hurt, Astronomer, NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, California
      Institute of Technology

WGBH Boston

WGBH Boston, the single largest producer of PBS prime-time, children's and online programming, and a pioneer in educational multimedia and media access technologies, is collaborating with Microsoft to develop engaging online content using the WorldWide Telescope technology. WGBH's NOVA is working with Microsoft to develop an interactive online tour that will use the WorldWide Telescope to navigate science and technology content from NOVA broadcasts and Web site content. The WGBH kids program Fetch! is exploring the possibility of a segment where an episode's challenge uses the WorldWide Telescope. In addition, WGBH's Teachers' Domain is looking at ways to create an online tour for educators and students to use the WorldWide Telescope.

"WorldWide Telescope really seems to be opening a door for everyone to explore and connect with the heavens ... exploring stories that they don't even know are available to them."

- Jonathan C. Abbott, President and Chief Executive Officer, WGBH

Educational Foundation

Griffith Observatory and Space Telescope Science Institute (STSCI) also are WorldWide Telescope partners.

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