Talk Like A Physicist

So who else is waiting for the WorldWide Telescope Launch?

If you live in this universe, you have probably heard of the new, fantastic project from Microsoft. There was some mystery/secrecy behind it, but it has been unveiled at TED today and it is indeed The WorldWide Telescope. as people had speculated.

WorldWide Telescope is an observatory on your desktop, allowing you to see the sky in a way you have never seen before; individual exploration, multi-wavelength views, stars and planets within context to each other, zoom in/out, and a capability for anyone to create and share a tour of the universe.

“The WorldWide Telescope takes the best images from the greatest telescopes on Earth…and in space…and assembles them into a seamless, holistic view of the universe,” Gould, of the Harvard Center for Astrophysics, said at the TED conference.

Here is another screenshot.

I am really excited about the multi wavelength view and the built in sharing capability of the software.

In fact, if this has been done right, one should be able to see the signatures of the Dark Matter in this visualization too! I know for sure that you can see the Einstein rings in these types of visualization and inferring dark matter from a multitude of these rings is an approachable task.

I was hoping that the beta version would be ready by now, but I guess we’ll have to wait for another month or so.

Want to see another screen shot?

Click on the image for a better view!

A lot better than Google Sky or Stellarium.

Update: Check out the video from TED by Roy Gould.

Thursday threads : Physics is harder than Calculus

Physics sure is harder than Calculus!

From the Designer:

I drew the first draft of this cartoon one afternoon after a particularly frustrating bout of electromagnetic physics homework. I showed it to my professor, who thought it was funny and suggested that we make “Physics 122 Class T-Shirts” for the students to purchase. I thought that was a fun idea, so I re-drew the picture on clear white paper, with thick boldface ink strokes, to more easily be transferred to fabric.