Microsoft announced today that it will open-source its WorldWide Telescope project (WWT). Begun in 2007, the WWT was founded as a collaborative institutional program with the goal of creating “a free unified contextual visualization of the universe with global reach that lets users explore multispectral imagery, all of which is deeply connected to scholarly publications and online research databases.” Given that the response around ET was, “What? Microsoft has a telescope program?” the group could’ve clearly handled visibility a bit better, but the program is quite impressive.

The point of this move is to expand the scope of the original WWT mission and explore new ways of using this information in educational and outreach projects. Given the claims Microsoft is making, we decided to download the application and see for ourselves.



The verdict? This program is pretty awesome. It integrates tutorials on various topics and smart context menus. Right-click on a constellation, galaxy, or planet and you can pull up its entry in various databases, from mainstream Wikipedia to specialized astronomy encyclopedias. Microsoft notes that these “Guided Tours” are at the heart of what it hopes others will build on, stating that one important feature of the program is the ability to tell stories about everything from stellar formation to planetary detection.

This push to make the WWT open source could be seen as another area where Redmond is playing nicer with other operating systems and communities than it has in previous years. Late last year, Microsoft announced it would open-source .NET, the fundamental application framework for Windows products. The company now produces an Office suite for Android and iOS. The push, under Nadella, seems to have shifted from creating an MS-only ecosystem to recognizing the realities of products people are using in the mobile environment and finding ways to tie to them that make sense for both the company and its consumers.

It’s too early to tell where the Worldwide Telescope might go, but if you’d like to see gorgeous images of Mars, peruse the photo galleries of other planets, or take a virtual 3D tour of the solar system, it’s a good place to start. The program can be run via standalone application or through the browser, with more details and recent updates available online. It’s not clear when Microsoft will release the open source version of the program — presumably the company wants to finish tidying up the code and complete feature introductions before it does so.