The universe under your fingers

The universe has always caused man's fascination since his most primitive origins. Spending hours at night contemplating the celestial vault is one of those pleasures that more and more people are unaware of its existence due to light pollution in the cities of our technological civilization. But to artificially alleviate this lack of our times, there are programs for our computers that are true planetariums, where we can visualize an exact representation of the sky that we have above us of our head in a given geographical situation and time.

Disclosure as a telescope objective

Currently we have excellent applications such as Stellarium, which perform the perfect simulation of the situation, brightness and relative size in which we can observe celestial objects at any time.

However, the Microsoft WorldWide Telescope goes one step further, uniting the mathematical quality of the planetarium, with multimedia capabilities that represent the universe more accessible and interesting to the general public.

Thus we have two bars, upper and lower, that offer us multimedia information about the region of space that we are exploring, and the main or most important objects.

At the top we can access general information related to the main current astronomical programs, such as Chandra, Spitzer, ect.In addition to selecting the “Guided Tours” tab, you can access the library of guided tours of the main stellar objects such as black holes or supernovae, discoveries of the Martian rovers, or black matter among much more information.

At the bottom we are offered the most interesting or noted objects that we have within reach in our current field of vision. Being an easy and simple way to be able to locate that galaxy or nebula that we have heard of, but that we could not place in the celestial sphere.

The possibility of obtaining images from various sources adds another level of depth to this excellent planetarium. So I can switch from the visible spectrum to the Infrared, taking the SFD Dust Map as a source, and have the feeling that we live in hellIn addition, all multimedia information is automatically adjusted to the data source.

Another feature is offered if we click on the vault with the right mouse button, opening the object explorer that offers us precise astronomical information about the star we have selected. And, in case we want an exhaustive review, it links us to the website of the source of the information; such as NASA or the University of Berkley.

But it is not only a dissemination tool, it is also from a scientific point of view, since it is behind the Microsoft Research program.

Thus, for example, we can download a small AddIn for Excel that allows us to connect with the WWT in real time and expose our data model on the capabilities of the Planetarium Or connect and control our physical telescope from the planetarium itself.

In short, a very complete astronomical dissemination tool.

More information | Microsoft WorldWide Telescope, Layerscape