World Wide Telescope presentation from TED online

Here's the video of Roy Gould's TED 2008 presentation on the World Wide Telescope project. My kids are going to love it when it goes live this spring. Link

Mark Frauenfelder is the founder of Boing Boing and the editor-in-chief of MAKE and Cool Tools. Twitter: @frauenfelder. Come and hear Mark speak at the ALA conference in Chicago on July 1.

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tonx

so this is basically google sky with some photosynth rendering?
Bill Simmon

Sienna’s Starry Night has been doing this for years, though it’s not free. But it combines Hubble and other image data for it’s real-time sky view, plus TONS of navagation tools — view the night sky from the surface of Betelguise and then zoom in and check out our solar system, etc.
Chris

I got a chance to talk to Curtis Wong and play with Microsoft’s WorldWide Telescope software earlier this year at the American Astronomical Society meeting. It really blows away the clunky interface Google Earth has right now. It’s also fairly easy to author some guided tours. I think it will be a great tool. I would, however, like to highlight the incredible open source planetarium software Stellarium (http://www.stellarium.org/), which I use for teaching right now. It also has a comprehensive scripting language and allows for additional images to be placed within it.
therascalking13

While this does look very sweet and all, it’s not particularly revolutionary. Consider checking out Stellarium for your local operating system. It’s beautiful, engrossing, well supported, and I give it my seal of approval as an amateur astronomer.

And it’s available now!