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The worldwide telescope from Microsoft Research was shown at the TED conference this week by Roy Gould and MSR's Curtis Wong. Not due to be available widely until this Spring, the WWT has already floored everyone who has seen it from complete neophytes like myself to career astronomers who can best appreciate its unique capabilities (I hear it can interface with certain mid tier telescopes to synch your view!) Yes, it even brought scoble to tears, which he explains here. Click the image below to see WWT at TED.

MSR researcher Jim Gray, possibly known best for his work on very large databases and Terraserver, the web's first earth viewer, has been pivotal in the evolution of the WWT. I saw Jim present some of his work on Skyserver at Teched in Barcelona a couple of years back and it was immediate to all how passionate he was about the work he was contributing in this field. Here is a paper from 2002 that presents some of the vision for the WWT. At last years Techfest there was a massive 16 monitor grid showing an early WWT in action that had a continuous crowd around it. This year's Techfest takes place next week here in Redmond and I'm most looking forward to seeing the latest. I think its awesome that the WWT team has dedicated the project to Jim.