I am avid amateur astronomer, so imagine my delight when those clever people at Microsoft released Worldwide Telescope, free, yesterday. WWT turns your pc into a planetarium, and its pretty amazing. I spent a great deal of time mucking around in it last night. The effort that has gone in and the data that is available to it is phenomenal. Really great when its 2 degrees outside and you don't really feel like setting up your telescope with frozen fingers.

The software is free and can be downloaded from http://www.worldwidetelescope.org/

I've just been checking this out. It really is a great piece of software. Kind of like Google Earth (or Microsoft's own "Virtual" derivative) only looking outwards into space. They must have gathered a staggering amount of data. The only downside is the listed system requirements. They're pretty steep and include a dual-core processor running at 2GHz or more.

-Paul

Yes they are pretty steep. That being said, I am running it on a box with a Pentium 4 2.4Ghz processor, and I haven't had any issues. The big thing is a decent graphics card and sufficient disk space for the swap file. I have the Gforce FX 5700, 1 gig RAM and 285GB free disk space.

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The names Diana, but you can call me Di.