I posted 2 weeks ago about a mystery of what made blogger Robert Scoble cry. He wasn’t allowed to tell anybody about it yet, but it was something Microsoft was cooking up that drew a tear. One commenter suggested that it was Microsoft’s Photosynth project. I checked out Photosynth. Very, very cool and perhaps I’ll do a video for you later on that.

But, no. It was, instead, a project called World Wide Telescope. You can view the project’s official website here.

In short, World Wide Telescope looks to be a Google Maps for the heavens. I will quote their entire official website (yeah, it’s that short):

The WorldWide Telescope (WWT) is a rich visualization environment that functions as a virtual telescope, bringing together imagery from the best ground and space telescopes in the world for a seamless, guided exploration of the universe.

WorldWide Telescope, created with Microsoft’s high-performance Visual Experience Engine™, enables seamless panning and zooming across the night sky blending terabytes of images, data, and stories from multiple sources over the Internet into a media-rich, immersive experience.

Scoble describes using it:

So, back to the World Wide Telescope. You drag around the sky. There’s Mars. There’s the big dipper. There’s Betelguese. Etc. It’s just like the star party you probably attended in college.

But it has one difference between any telescope you’ve ever looked at.

You can zoom. Zoom. Zoom. Zoom.

We picked a point of light inside the big dipper. Zoom. Zoom. Zoom. Zoom. Holy shit, it’s two galaxies colliding. It looked like a star. Zoom. Zoom. Zoom.

Unfortunately, we’re going to have to wait until Spring to see a glimpse of it.

I can’t help but wonder why the hooplah. Sure, it’s cool, but all this wait just to put up a website with two paragraphs and say "keep waiting"?