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Posts Tagged ‘WorldWide Telescope’

The software giant’s Terapixel project stitched together 1,791 pairs of red-light and blue-light plates from telescopes in California and Australia. The result is the map above, which covers the night sky of the northern and southern hemispheres.

Using WorldWide Telescope and Bing maps, you can zoom in on the cosmos, peering through the dust of the Milky Way to distant galaxies. Microsoft announced Terapixel July 13 at its annual Research Faculty Summit.

To view every pixel of the image, you'd need a half-million high-definition televisions. If you tried to print it, the document would extend the length of a football field, Microsoft says.

The project required re-computing all the image data collected by the Digitized Sky Survey during the past 50 years. The images, produced by the Palomar telescope in California and the Schmidt telescope in Australia, each cover an area of the cosmos six and a half degrees square.

The map’s quality and clarity stems from computerized changes to the original images, which have varying levels of brightness, color saturation, noise and vignetting, which is darkening of the corners.

Developers ran parallel code on 512 computer cores in a Windows High Performance Computing cluster, and were able to process the raw digitized data in about half a day, according to Microsoft. Once the files were decompressed, they had to undergo some changes to correct the vignetting problem. Red and blue plates had to be precisely aligned to make a color image, and then everything had to be stitched together, which took about three more hours.

Terapixel then used an image optimization program to create a seamless, spherical panorama of the sky. That took about four hours, according to Microsoft.

The final image is 802 GB.

[Microsoft Research via HPCWire]

NASA scientists have been crunching data for three years on more than 100 computers to come up with the brand-new Mars map. Its image collection spans the Viking orbiters nearly 40 years ago to the HiRISE camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which is still snapping pictures.

NASA says it was looking for a way to share its wealth of Mars images, and WorldWide Telescope was a good fit. To use it, you have to download the PC-only free program, or use a Web client.

NASA says the map may lead to new scientific discoveries.

The program lets you fly through a 3-D rendering of Victoria Crater, soar past Olympus Mons and examine rock formations with surface-level detail.

In some Martian locales, you can right-click an image, and you'll find Web pages for the missions that captured them.

The 3-D effect is derived from information provided by an instrument called MOLA, the Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter, which flew on the Mars Global Surveyor. Scientists at NASA's Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, Calif., combined the data with regular images to come up with 3-D views.

The images themselves reside on the Nebula cloud at NASA-Ames.

Two NASA scientists also offer video tours. James Garvin of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., walks viewers through the geological history of Mars and discusses three possible landing sites for human missions there. Carol Stoker of Ames addresses the question of whether Mars harbors life, and discusses the findings of NASA's Mars Phoenix Lander.

[NASA]