WorldWide Telescope web client now available

The WorldWide Telescope team has released a web client for WorldWide Telescope, written in Silverlight and currently in alpha but from my testing works quite well.

WorldWide Telescope web client

It doesn't support the 3D solar system view yet, but pretty much everything else is in there, including tours. Performance isn't as good compared to the full Windows client which makes use of 3D hardware acceleration. Nevertheless it is pretty useable, and the servers at the moment don't seem to be under as much load as they were when the full client was released last year. As someone who is in the process of making a couple of tours I can't grumble at the increased install base that having a web client will bring.

Check it out at worldwidetelescope.org/webclient.

2 comments

Comment from: Justen [Visitor] · http://www.justenrobertson.com

I can see that you're a big Microsoft guy, but as an astronomer, have you checked out Celestia? It's a planetarium app that is extensively moddable and has a large community of contributers. With sufficient extensions it has an incredible wealth of data and some beautiful compositions of astronomical photographs - including some beautiful high-res texture maps of the planets and a massive index of known stars and other celestial objects. WWT has some great features too of course, but I try to turn anyone I come across who is into astronomy on to Celestia :)

24th March 2009 @ 10:28

Comment from: Paul Smith [Member] · http://www.dasmirnov.net/

Yeah I've been using Celestia for years for 3D solar system, where it is far superior to WWT, where the 3D solar system was bolted on a couple of releases ago, infact I used to host hundreds of MBs of high-res planet textures for Celestia. A lot of people also come up with Stellarium, again which I've used for the sky view before WWT came out. However what a lot of people fail to realise is with WWT you get tens of terabytes worth of images, not just of objects but dozens of all-sky surveys.

Want to view the whole sky in hydrogen alpha, x-ray or gamma rays? You can with WWT.

24th March 2009 @ 12:33

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