Google & the People's Cosmos -New Frontiers in Space
Carol Christian and Alberto Conti of the Hubble Space Telescope Science Institute give a brilliant video tour at the Googleplex of the Universe and the revolution now underway in astronomy and astrophysics. The next decade will witness the completion of massive, wide-area, multicolor imaging and spectroscopic surveys of the local and distant Universe.
With the coming flood of information, the next step of this task is to allow users to actively explore the cosmos themselves. In this talk they show some of the potential explorations of this wealth of data to help us all better understand the Universe in which we live.
Earlier this year Microsoft unveiled a demo of the virtual "World-wide Telescope," which aims to allow a PC to impersonate a powerful, ground-based telescope. The software draws on tens of millions of digital images that are part of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and other sources, such as NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. The demo zoomed out from Microsoft's Redmond campus to view Earth and then zooming farther out, beyond our galaxy, showed the Big Dipper and several other galaxies from the same vantage point.
Posted by Casey Kazan.
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