Hatrack River Writers Workshop: Microsoft Worldwide (or Universal) Telescope

This is topic Microsoft Worldwide (or Universal) Telescope in forum Open Discussions About Writing at Hatrack River Writers Workshop.

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Posted by Kathleen Dalton Woodbury (Member # 59) on :

I read about this in this morning's Deseret News.

Haven't actually checked it out, but it sounds as if it might be of interest to science fiction writers, at the very least.

Posted by TaleSpinner (Member # 5638) on :

I thought so too. But my post got zero response :-(

http://www.hatrack.com/forums/writers/forum/Forum1/HTML/004812.html

Cheers,
Pat

Posted by Kathleen Dalton Woodbury (Member # 59) on :

Well, maybe if enough of us hear about it from enough different places, someone will finally notice?

The thing I liked about my article was that he talked about how Google does something similar, so you can compare the two.

Posted by Rommel Fenrir Wolf II (Member # 4199) on :

Just mind bending on how much time and money Microsoft has on its hands. I think they should start building Earths first starship.

RFW2nd

Posted by Bent Tree (Member # 7777) on :

*Taps fingers together*

Downloading now.

Posted by Bent Tree (Member # 7777) on :

quote:
Just mind bending on how much time and money Microsoft has on its hands. I think they should start building Earths first starship.

Just so long as they don't develop time travel or teleportation. I would hate for Time Explore 7.0 to crash while I was visiting the ancient Mayans

Posted by Bent Tree (Member # 7777) on :

This is fun! You should try it

It is basically a way to save a bunch of time. I have spent hours at a time looking at different images on diferent sites. This on is pretty much fully interactive. You can scroll the universe.

*Disassembling cheap Radioshack telescope*

Posted by TaleSpinner (Member # 5638) on :

I tried it too. In the small print it says 1G of RAM is enough, and it is.

It will take a while to explore the tool and its capabilities properly but it seems you can point your telescope anywhere in the sky and zoom--lots. It has a wonderful way of moving the telescope, with smooth pans and zooms that can be quite dizzying.

As you scan the sky it indicates points of interest you might care to explore further. Place the cursor over stars and galaxies to learn their names.

You can tell it where you'd like your telescope. Default is at Microsoft's labs, but I've moved mine to London so I can see the night sky as it really is over my head.

My only disappointment is that I searched Mars for Beagle and it definitely isn't there :-(

Cheers,
Pat