Hands on with Microsoft's new WorldWide Telescope beta

On Wednesday, Microsoft announced the "Equinox" beta update to the WorldWide Telescope, its vast astronomical visualization software. We spent some time with the software to see how well you can navigate the universe in 3D.

Since its launch last spring, the WorldWide Telescope has attracted over 1.5 million downloads -- hardly an unknown application, and yet it's so ridiculously vast that it's hard to say anyone knows the WWT. Plenty of people have carved out their own happy niches, though, and among the fresh charms of the Autumnal Equinox beta is improved display of the service's virtual guided tours.

Our initial tests Wednesday evening weren't able to include some of our favorite WWT functionality -- its integration with various amateur telescopes -- but those features are said to carry over nicely in the new version.

It's hard to compare a computer program to a nebula or the spectacle of gravitational lensing, but in its class, the tech that manages the WWT is pretty fancy too. It runs on the Visual Experience Engine, which handles the work of combining images, data, and annotations from databases around the Web.

That data lives at NASA; it lives at CalTech; it lives in a lot of places and comes in from even more. After all, any user can build and share a guided tour -- a WWT file containing XML, thumbnails and even audio -- with other users. According to company representatives speaking Wednesday at PDC, between 12 and 20 terabytes of the most in-demand data is cached at Microsoft's Virtual Earth data center; hundreds of terabytes more rest in servers elsewhere on the Net.

In our tests, download times ranged widely depending on the obscurity and complexity of the item we'd requested, but thumb-twiddling waits were rarer than they were in our initial tests last spring. Our Windows XP system was, however, sorely tested; although the specs say your system can manage on 1GB RAM and 128MB video RAM, you may consider those to be absolute minimums.

Other new features in Equinox include a 3D viewer for our solar system, which worked nicely; the program correctly synchronized to current sky data, including last night's New Moon. As mentioned, we were unable to test the telescope integration of the new version and were, in the case of our lunar companion, forced to actually look up at the sky -- reminding us that programs like WWT have special charm for those living in urban areas bereft of dark-sky viewing.

Like other WWT images, those are mapped using a multiresolution map system based on the work done by the late Jim Gray on TerraServer and SkyServer, and on his contributions to the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. The sphere of the heavens (well, from any particular viewpoint, that's how we perceive the thing) is condensed to one 256x256-pixel image. Divide that image into four sections, as if you're looking inside a pyramid from the apex down; each section is allotted its own 256x256-pixel square slice, and so on as far as as one can zoom.

Overall, the program exhibits good growth from its launch version, though the controls can still be frustrating for veterans of a package like Starry Night. It does, however, continue to blow Google Sky off the star chart. Mac users continue to be out of luck; the system still requires a PC, which seems a significant drawback for the program's stated goal of providing kids and classrooms with an easily accessible scientific resource.

Developers get good Equinox news, with a developer Web site on the way soon, and astronomers will appreciate the ability to import and position files with AVM (Astronomy Visualization Metadata) tags into collections and even those wonderful guided tours.

So what do you do once you've mastered the universe, or at least made remarkable strides on the display thereof? Well, say Microsoft reps, something's up... but they won't say what. A possible hint? The paper that kicked off the whole project back in 2002 [PDF available here] was subtitled "An archetype for online science." And WWT project leaders have spoken previously about the uses of projects like the WWT to do crowdsourced "citizen scinece."

Chemistry, mathematics, or biology anyone?