Headlines - Explore the stars with Microsoft's WorldWide Telescope

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Enjoy a bit of star-gazing do you? Well, now you can find out exactly what it is you've been gazing at.

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Wow, this looks great. I'm downloading this for sure.

Very good although I was hoping for better images and being able to rotate around planets etc.

How exactly do you get it to work?

I downloaded the setupwwt.exe file, but all it does is repairs Microsoft Journal Viewer and closes :(

Piranha,

Have a look at Celestia available from shatters.net then follow the link to Celestia , it enables you to do just that (sorry, I tried to put a link but I wasn't allowed).

There's also lots of random add-ons at celestiamotherlode.net, incuding some good fictional dowloads from the Sci-fi world. Plus loads of help from the online community that's well worth a read, they can be a bit clcky at times but don't let that put you off.

As for World Wide Telescope it looks pretty awesome, I'm gonna have to play with this one for a while.

its disapointly limited, even for a free tool given the hype i'd expected more.

It works fairly well. Some of the guided tours are annoying in their choice of music/soundtrack and it would be nice to have the option to mute it inside the app. I'm interested to see how this, or rather the image bank developes - I hope NASA and the other main contributors continue to support it. At present, there's not a whole lot I haven't seen elsewhere but the biggest draw in my opinion is that you're now seeing them in context; instead of a static image you get to see where it lives, get a greater sense of how far away it is, and see to some extent see what surrounds it.

I tried one of the guided tours over the weekend, found it rather fascinating!