Putting Microsoft`s Worldwide Telescope Under a Lens - Specifications
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I mentioned earlier that in order to use Worldwide Telescope, you have to download the software and be connected to the Internet. However, there are some pretty hefty system requirements as well. For one, they recommend that you run it on Windows Vista (FYI - it only works with a Windows OS), with an Intel Core 2 Duo chip with 2 GHz, and at least 1GB of RAM. This is all recommended, mind you, but the minimum requirements are there as well.
The first thing you see when you open the program is a view of the night sky with stick drawings of all of the constellations. Instead of being a flat, distorted view (as in Google Sky) the view is from the center of a sphere, or the equatorial coordinate system. The navigation in the Worldwide Telescope is more advanced as well. In addition to having the right ascension and declination, there are up to seven tabs (Explore, Guided Tours, Search, Community, Telescope, View, and Settings) with multiple options in each for you to choose from. You move around by clicking and dragging with the left mouse button, and holding down Ctrl or the center mouse button will rotate your view. Scrolling the mouse wheel zooms in and out and right clicking will display information about the celestial body.
Worldwide Telescope has the same Google Sky feature that allows you to view space in the non-visible spectrum, only there are more options to choose from. There is also a larger collection of more detailed images from the different telescopes. For example, one can actually look at the ring of dark matter in the cluster ZwCl0024+1652. Overall, it presents a much more vivid experience of outer space. Here's what Roy Gould, the man who unveiled Worldwide Telescope at the Technology Entertainment Design (TED) conference in February, had to say:
Even though you can download any professional image of the universe now online, it's a fragment. This puts it together seamlessly and gives you the impression that you're traveling through space.
Next: A Guided Tour >>
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