Microsoft have announced that they have finished developing a free tool available to everyone. This free tool provides amazing quality images of our night sky from various telescopes from across the globe including, Hubble and the Chandra X-ray Observatory. This has received a lot of attention from amateur astronomers as well as normal everyday computer users.

With the pan and zoom feature, users can enjoy many more parts of space and planets that they may never have seen or heard of before.

"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," says Roy Gould, a Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics researcher.

Currently only available to windows users, you have to download a simple program and you’re all set on your mission of exploration.

As data is from different sources, including NASA, this allows users to switch between views at different wave lengths and through different telescopes.

Microsoft's new application, WorldWide Telescope, is not the only tool that allows astronomers to explore the night sky from their computers as many companies before them have created ‘virtual telescopes’ including Google Earth, who created the add-on ‘Sky’ which allowed users to glide through more than 1 million stars and 200 million galaxies.

Microsoft hope this to be as popular and as useful as many programs before them have proven to be.


Read full news article: Virtual telescope opens up sky [external link]