The Earth Is Square

Ok, I have been using World Wide Telescope most the day now (and I keep typing WorldWind Telescope) and thought I would give a more detailed review of the application. I did keep in mind that 1) it IS from Microsoft.. so it will be buggy and b) it is a beta release (but then isn't every Microsoft product beta? )

I am not going to compare to Google Earth Sky at this time.  Also not going to compare it to my favorite sky viewing application, Stellarium at this time.  This is just a round up of what I think of WWTelescope for now.

Requirements

Here is what is required for WWTelescope to function

• Microsoft® XP SP2 (minimum), Windows® Vista® (recommended)
• PC with Intel Core 2 Duo processor with 2 gigahertz (GHz) or faster, recommended
• 1 gigabyte (GB) of RAM; 2 GB RAM recommended
• 3D accelerated card with 128 megabytes (MB) RAM; discrete graphics card with dedicated 256-MB VRAM recommended for higher performance
• 1 GB of available hard disk space; 10 GB recommended for off-line features and higher performance browsing
• XGA (1024 x 768) or higher resolution monitor
• Microsoft Mouse or compatible pointing and scrolling device
• Microsoft® DirectX® version 9.0c and .NET Framework 2.0
• Internet connection

Download and Setup

Downloading and setup went easily and smoothly, the download comes in at 20.8MB and the install only asks where to install WWTelescope.  After that, all there is left to do is launch the application.

Using WWTelescope

When you load WWTelescope, you get a default view that looks something like this:

Figuring out how to use WWTelescope is fairly straight forward I thought.  And if my 10 and 7 year old can figure out how to use WWTelescope in three minutes, anyone can use it.  What I like about this interface is that is is not distracting, you don't have clashing colors or windows open everywhere or placemarks all over your sky view.  The only "addition" to the sky view is that constellations are outlined by a box.

The WWTelescope application is divided into five main sections.

This is the "Menu Bar"[1], clicking on these menu options will change the selections on the "Tool Bar"[1].

Explore is where you will be mostly, this menu gives you access to the imagery collections, sky surveys, and other collections.

Guided Tours will give you a selections of Tours that you can download and view in WWTelescope.

Search is the what it says, you can enter a name or a partial name and get all the objects that match the spelling

Community will enable you to join external groups and share collections and tours

Telescope will enable you to connect you're computer controlled telescope to WWTelescope

View will change the viewing options such as constellations , overlays, location, and observing time

Next down is the "Tool Bar"[1], when you select an item from the "Menu Bar", the "Tool Bar" changes to reflect that selection.  The upper left shows you where in the "folder setup" you are.  Upper right will move you through pages of selections.  Clicking on an item will open another level with selections you can view.

This is the "Main Window"[1], this is where you will view the sky and all related information.

I'll call this the "Context Bar"[1], for lack of a better idea.  This bar changes it's content depending on where you are looking and how much zoom you are using.  Hovering your mouse over an image will highlight  it in the "Main Window", clicking will focus on the object and zoom you in slightly.

The top left has three options that can be changed.  The first drop down changes what you are looking at, changing that also changes the selections under the Imagery drop down.  You can view the Earth (which gives you a virtual globe of the Earth with Virtual Earth imagery), you can also view other planets in the virtual globe view, Sky is the default setting and is the view of outer space, and Panorama; which will give you a wide angle view.

As you select a choice under Look At the Imagery drop down selections change as well.  The Imagery is the base layer that you are looking at, other imagery and collections are displayed on top.

Top right has the Context Filter, you can limit what will be shown on the Context Bar.  also on this side there is the page forward and back buttons.[3]

This is the "Position Information"[1] window.  This gives you information as to where in the sky you are looking, what constellation you are viewing in and the progress of the data download.

Navigating

Navigation is straight forward if you are use to virtual globes. 

• Left click and move your mouse to change the position of the sky you are viewing
• Use the scroll wheel, -/+ or PgUp/PgDn buttons to zoom in and out
• Drag with the center button or hold down ctrl to rotate and tilt the view
• Clicking on an object's thumbnail will pan to that object
• Double click an object to zoom in

Related to navigation are the View settings. You can turn on constellations and their boundaries, turn on overlay information, change you're observation location (and if you want to view from that location, more in a moment), and change the date and time of the sky as well as changing from real-time to fast-forward/fast-reverse time.

The Observation Location was something I actually did not notice the change on right away, mainly the "View from this location" checkbox.  Depending on if that box is checked or not, affects how you are viewing the sky.  If it is NOT checked you're sky will look like below.  Notice the "Position Information" window, it is a sphere and the yellow is you're field of view with the center of the sphere being you.

Now, if you check "View from this location", your view changes to similar to below.  You get a flat horizon and the "Position Information" box has changed.  Now you have a compass view, with the field of view looking either North, south, East and West.  Also, you can no longer look at southern hemisphere (or northern if you are on the other side) features when in this mode. 

Navigation and looking at features is one thing, how about getting some detailed information as well.  If you right click on a feature, you will get a window like this one:

This will open up the Finder Scope and give you some detailed information about the object being selected.

Click on the Research tab and you can look up more information about the object, or other imagery for it.  You can also add the feature to you're own collection.

Guided Tours

This, I think is one of the best features of WWTelescope.  Tours remind me of a beefed up Power Point presentation.  With interactivity, text on the screen and voice overs, there is a lot of room for making some great content. 

Using Your Telescope with WWTelescope

Next to the Guided Tours, this is one of the great features.  So, if you have one of the new(er) telescopes that can plug into a computer, you can use WWTelescope to control it.  More information can be found here.

Settings

From the settings tab you can change the Solar System and Earth/Planets options.  You can also make changes to you're user experience, such as zoom speed and image quality.

Cache

The system cache is divided into three sections: Imagery, Cached Tours, Catalogs.  I am not sure if there is a max size the caches can be, but the more you have downloaded locally, the less you will need to use the Internet connection.  Also you can select one or all of the three caches to purge them of all content.  This is nice if you want to keep your imagery, but clean out the tours you have viewed.

System Resources

This is a 3D application, so the CPU use hovered at 35% to 40% for general browsing.  When I would use the more advanced features, such as the Guided Tours, I would stay at a solid 50% CPU use while I was running the tour.

Memory use would stay at 13MB to 80MB for general use under 45 minutes.  I noticed the longer I ran WWTelescope the more the ram would be used up by the program.  The max I have hit so far is 380MB of memory use when running a guided tour.

I have yet to have the application lockup or crash yet, though I am sure it will happen sometime in the near future.

Bugs

[3] I have only spied a couple of bugs so far.  The biggest bug that bothers me is that I can't scroll the features bar on the bottom, I can click the next arrow, go to page two.. but then it resets a second later back to page one.

Another bug I have noticed is that some of the background imagery, when selected, will not load and all I have is a gray screen.

Overall

Overall, I am impressed by World Wind Telescope and shows that a dedicated application is a better way to go over a hodgepodge application that tries to do everything.  The imagery is fantastic and just the shear amount imagery that can be selected and viewed will takes weeks or months to just glance over.

I have only found just a couple of small bugs that made things more of a nuisance than anything.  The advanced features will make amateur astronomers happy.  But this is an application that all will enjoy, from ages 1 to 99.

Next up I will compare to Google Earth Sky and Stellarium, that will take a little longer to go though.

Notes

[1] Could not find any documentation or screen shots.. so I am guessing at the names of the windows. [2]

[2] Ok, so it also turned into something of a first run tutorial as well.