Net-Warriors

From the world of competitive astronomical websites (isn’t the Internet grand?) comes this new offering from Microsoft, WorldWide Telescope. Like others before it Microsoft’s new offering allows users to explore planets and other celestial objects. You can also view/track objects from any place on earth and in any point in time. Of course as you might expect from Microsoft there’s more going on than that. There is a lot of imagery from NASA including the Mars rovers, Hubble telescope, the Spitzer Space Telescope and the Chandra X-ray Observatory. There are also ‘tours’ set up by expert astronomers or you can even save your own ‘5 year missions’.

Like with Google’s ‘The Sky’ or the open source Stellarium users must first download the free WorldWide Telescope software from Microsoft (windows only).

WorldWide Telescope (via BBC News)

Two things we really like at Net-Warriors are cool images and cool technology and here’s an example of both. The World Sunlight map uses a combination of several satellite images, a DOD program that maps city lights and some very clever implementation to provide a computer generated approximation using real images to show what the earth looks like from space at the moment.

You can choose either a flat map or globe view and a few other variations. You can even embed it on your own web page if you wish.

The best way to summarize this site to quote the author himself - ‘While less impressive than actually being into orbit, this is much more accessible to most of us.’

The World Sunlight Map

(also if you have a little geek in you check out how it works).