WorldWide Telescope

WorldWide Telescope is an open source set of applications, data and cloud services, originally created by Microsoft Research but now an open source project hosted in GitHub TheNET Foundation holds the copyright and the project is managed by the American Astronomical Society and has been supported by grants from the Moore Foundation and National Science Foundation WWT displays astronomical, earth and planetary data allowing visual navigation through the 3-dimensional Universe. Users are able to navigate the sky by panning and zooming, or explore the 3D universe from the surface of Earth to past the Cosmic microwave background , viewing both visual imagery and scientific data about that area and the objects in it. Data is curated from hundreds of different data sources, but its open data nature allows users to explore any third party data that conforms to a WWT supported format. With the rich source of multi-spectral all-sky images it is possible to view the sky in many wavelengths of light. The software utilizes Microsoft's Visual Experience Engine technologies to function. WWT can also be used to visualize arbitrary or abstract data sets and time series data.