WorldWide Telescope

WorldWide Telescope (WWT) is an open-source set of applications, data and cloud services, originally created by Microsoft Research but now an open source project hosted on GitHub. The .NET Foundation holds the copyright and the project is managed by the American Astronomical Society and has been supported by grants from the Moore Foundation and National Science Foundation. WWT displays astronomical, earth and planetary data allowing visual navigation through the 3-dimensional (3D) Universe. Users are able to navigate the sky by panning and zooming, or explore the 3D universe from the surface of Earth to past the Cosmic microwave background (CMB), viewing both visual imagery and scientific data (academic papers, etc.) about that area and the objects in it. Data is curated from hundreds of different data sources, but its open data nature allows users to explore any third party data that conforms to a WWT supported format. With the rich source of multi-spectral all-sky images it is possible to view the sky in many wavelengths of light. The software utilizes Microsoft's Visual Experience Engine technologies to function. WWT can also be used to visualize arbitrary or abstract data sets and time series data.

WWT is completely free and currently comes in two versions: a native application that runs under Microsoft Windows (this version can use the specialized capabilities of a computer graphics card to render up to a half million data points), and a web client based on HTML5 and WebGL. The web client uses a responsive design which allows people to use it on smartphones and on desktops. The Windows desktop application is a high-performance system which scales from a desktop to large multi-channel full dome digital planetariums.

The WWT project began in 2002, at Microsoft Research and Johns Hopkins University. Database researcher Jim Gray had developed a satellite Earth-images database (Terraserver) and wanted to apply a similar technique to organizing the many disparate astronomical databases of sky images. WWT was announced at the TED Conference in Monterey, California in February 2008. As of 2016, WWT has been downloaded by at least 10 million active users."

As of February 2012 the earth science applications of WWT are showcased and supported by the Layerscape community collaboration website, also created by Microsoft Research. Since WWT has gone to Open Source Layerscape communities have been brought into the WWT application and re-branded simply "communities".

WorldWide Telescope has six main modes. These are Sky, Earth, Planets, Panoramas, Solar System and Sandbox.

Earth mode allows users to view a 3D model of the Earth, similar to NASA World Wind, Microsoft Virtual Earth and Google Earth. The Earth mode has a default data set with near global coverage and resolution down to sub-meter in high-population centers. Unlike most Earth viewers, WorldWide Telescope supports many different map projections including Mercator, Equirectangular and Tessellated Octahedral Adaptive Subdivision Transform (TOAST). There are also map layers for seasonal, night, streets, hybrid and science oriented Moderate-Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) imagery. The new layer manager can be used to add data visualization on the Earth or other planets.

Planets mode currently allows users to view 3D models of eight celestial bodies: Venus, Mars, Jupiter, the Galilean moons of Jupiter, and Earth's Moon. It also allows users to view a Mandelbrot set.

Sky mode is the main feature of the software. It allows users to view high quality images of outer space with images from many space and Earth-based telescopes. Each image is shown at its actual position in the sky. There are over 200 full-sky images in spectral bands ranging from radio to gamma-rays There are also thousands of individual study images of various astronomical objects from space telescopes such as the Hubble Space Telescope, the Spitzer Space Telescope in infrared, the Chandra X-ray Observatory, COBE, WMAP, ROSAT, IRAS, GALEX as well as many other space and ground-based telescopes. Sky mode also shows the Sun, Moon, planets, and their moons in their current positions.