Monday, Aug. 24, 2009

WorldWideTelescope

Like Google Earth for the heavens, WWT aggregates terabytes of astronomical data from the world's biggest telescopes to create a single virtual scope that anyone can look through. WWT is not a model of the known universe, but rather a centralized repository for just about everything known about the universe. The idea is to democratize the science of astronomy with a single tool that can be used by students and scientists. Who knows, when everyone has access to the same data, maybe the next big discovery in astronomy will be made by an amateur? There are hundreds of terabytes of digitized sky — enough data for everyone.