WorldWide Telescope Web Client now available

WorldWide Telescope Web Client now available – bringing the universe closer to everyone

As of today, WorldWide Telescope is no longer limited to the Windows operating system, as the an alpha version of the WorldWide Telescope Web Client was released – and it’s based on Silverlight 2.0! This means that you can now bring this virtual telescope to any platforms that supports Silverlight 2.0.

Below is a list of features in the web client:

* Access to hundreds of terabytes of sky, earth and planet data
* Ability to navigate seamlessly through 3D spherical environments
* Finder Scope to quickly identify astronomical objects
* Instant thumbnail previews of tens of thousands of popular astronomical objects
* Access to billions of objects in web-based astronomical catalogue
* Loading tours, images and other WorldWide Telescope data files on local machine
* Real-time positions of planets and moons
* Move forwards and backwards in time 2000 years
* View guided tours (without 3D planets)
* Browsing local user collections
* Virtual Observatory Cone search/registry look up and SIMBAD search

It is also said that the ability to change viewing location and a basic Solar System View are coming soon to the web client. It’s great to see Microsoft utilizing the capabilities of what Silverlight can do and brings its software cross-platform.

You can view the WorldWide Telescope Web Client (alpha) at http://www.worldwidetelescope.org/webclient

For anybody who's interested, I tried this on my Mac laptop today. It requires Microsoft Silverlight. :unsure:

Once I installed that and restarted Safari, lo and behold, it worked quite well. Also seems to work with Firefox.

Needless to say, I was quite shocked. :shocked:

Tom (:macwave:... still not a MS fan)