Microsoft Corp. launched its WorldWide Telescope late Monday, bringing the free Web-based program for zooming around the universe to a broad audience.
The world's most powerful optical telescope is now operating on southeastern Arizona's Mount Graham, capturing striking images of objects millions of light years away.
In a Feb. 3 story about the boom in giant telescopes, The Associated Press reported erroneously how far back in time current telescopes can see. They can see to when the universe was about 1 billion years old, not back only 1 billion years.
A telescope arms race is taking shape around the world. Astronomers are drawing up plans for the biggest, most powerful instruments ever constructed, capable of peering far deeper into the universe — and further back in time — than ever before.
A project to build a pioneering telescope in Chile got a $30 million boost Thursday with donations from Microsoft chairman Bill Gates and former company executive Charles Simonyi.
Having coaxed all the life they can out of an 8-year-old ultraviolet light-detecting space telescope, scientists will reluctantly turn it off later this month.
One of the world's largest and most powerful telescopes opened its shutters, turned its 34-foot wide mirror toward the skies and captured its first light at a mountaintop on one of Spain's Canary Islands on Saturday.
Google has already planted its flag on Earth, the Moon and Mars. The universe could be next. The Internet search company has struck a partnership with scientists building a huge sky-scanning telescope, with hopes of helping the public access digital footage of asteroids, supernovas and distant galaxies.
An astronaut removes the High Resolution Spectrograph to make way for the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph during the second servicing mission in 1997. The telescope can hold four telephone-booth sized instruments and four piano-sized instruments (Image: NASA)
Some of the most distant galaxies ever seen appear in the Hubble Ultra Deep Field North, a portion of which is shown here. If a new servicing mission is approved, a new instrument called the Wide Field Camera 3 would spot galaxies even more distant, and therefore further back in time (Image: NASA/ESA/S Beckwith/HUDF team)
In the biggest joint Mexico-U.S. scientific venture ever, builders are finishing a monster telescope on top of a volcano that will let astronomers look back 13 billion years and uncover secrets about the creation of the universe.
Microsoft's research division on Tuesday kicked off a public beta of WorldWide Telescope, a rich Web application that lets viewers peer deep into the universe and, perhaps, glimpse parts of the universe where Starbucks coffee shops don't exist.
Exploring the universe can be as simple as turning on your home computer thanks to a new digital archive filled with views from some of the world's best land- and space-based telescopes. Microsoft officially launched the free online WorldWide Telescope, which allows Internet den …
Microsoft Research is launching a free application today that lets people navigate deep into the universe and view galaxies, nebulae, planets and other celestial objects through the lenses of the world's best observatories.
First of all, if you want to try this baby for yourself, go get it here; the installation might take a while because you need .NET Framework 2.0 SDKs and DirectX (which I didn't have on my office computer).
A University of Leicester space scientist has worked out that sending texts via mobile phones works out to be far more expensive than downloading data from the Hubble Space Telescope!
The universe as we currently know it is made up of three dimensions of space and one of time, but researchers in the Department of Physics and the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Virginia Tech are exploring the possibility of an extra dimension.
Scientists at the University of Konstanz in Germany and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have demonstrated an ultrafast laser that offers a record combination of high speed, short pulses and high average power.
European Space Agency's orbiting X-ray observatory XMM-Newton has been used by a team of international astronomers to uncover part of the missing matter in the universe
A proposed space telescope would focus light primarily with a patterned sheet of metal rather than a large mirror or lens. The telescope would have amazingly sharp vision and could spot Earth-size planets around other stars, its backers say.
The Owl (Overwhelmingly Large Telescope) is an awesome project which requires international effort to make it happen.
Australia's leading astronomers will have to wait until 2011 to find out if one of the world's biggest telescopes will be built in Western Australia.
This blog describes the author's experiences with the wonderful hobby of stargazing. There are very helpful tips and suggestions for people who are new to this hobby.
Science Educator Roy Gould and Curtis Wong from Microsoft give an amazing preview of the Worldwide Telescope. Think of it as a Google Maps for the entire Universe.
Two sets of discoveries announced in recent days suggest that the Milky Way hosts many more sunlike solar systems than previously believed.
February 11, 1997 – Space Shuttle Discovery is launched on a mission to service the Hubble Space Telescope
A robotic observatory installed at a high-altitude site in Antarctica will search for planets orbiting other stars and test the site's potential for more ambitious observatories that could follow. The site may offer the best astronomical sky conditions in the world.
In the web a famous video shows a quiz master who asks the candidate which one of the following orbs are circulating around our planet Earth: the Sun, Mars, Venus or the Moon . Not only that the candidate missed the correct answer, 56 % of the audience voted against the Moon.
Owing to radio's aptitude in transporting information, our planet is endlessly peppered by man-made low-frequency radiation.
Excited Harvard astronomers announced today the discovery of an earth sized planet orbiting around the moon. This is the 288th exo-planet found so far and the most promising for life. The planet is less
Microsoft founder Bill Gates has donated ten million dollars to help build a 400-million dollar high-powered telescope in Chile, media here reported Saturday. Another Microsoft alumnus, Charles Simonyi, has donated 20 million dollars to the project, according to news reports.
We are able to view all entities, from the microworld to the universe, from a single perspective. By setting them up against a scale, we are able to compare and understand things which cannot be physically compared.
Mars Opposition! Mars will not be this close to Earth again until 2016: at a distance of 0.60 AU, or 56 million miles from Earth. Mars rises just after twilight in December. This month, Mars reaches its largest angular diameter of nearly 16 arcseconds.
This site provides continuous updates on the latest and most interesting telescope videos from around the world. Check it out, but be careful, it's addictive! :)
For more than eight hours last fall, the Chandra X-Ray Observatory stared at a nondescript galaxy 240 million light-years away. In that time, one of the detectors intercepted exactly four X-ray photons.
There's nothing that compares with your first outing with your telescope - what astronomers refer to as first light. But often the reality is very different, and people see very little, usually because they are too eager to get going.
