Want to try out for yourself what made Robert Scoble cry? Tonight, Microsoft Research has made available the Spring Beta of WorldWide Telescope.

Download: WorldWide Telescope Spring Release

WorldWide Telescope is an application designed to turn your PC into a "virtual telescope" by stitching together terabytes (soon to be petabytes) of high-resolution images of the universe. Massive amounts of data are generated by the various scientific and research facilities and WorldWide Telescope brings the catalog of that data together for anyone to access using the power of the Internet. This new application is particularly exciting for me being someone really heavy into astronomy.  You can also use WorldWide Telescope and connect an ASCOM-capable Telescope to your PC to watch the night sky.  

WorldWide Telescope lets me connect to Communities, access Collections of celestial objects such as the Solar System or Constellations, or take Guides Tours.

Using my mouse, I can navigate the cosmos zooming in and out to any object in the rich catalog of celestial objects. I can right-click to access quick information on any celestial object.

I can

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Today the Virtual Earth Team announced they successfully published their biggest update to the Virtual Earth platform yet - running at 26 terabytes! That is quite a bit of data to publish to the web. This update brings expanded aerial imagery and textured 3D buildings/cityscapes to new cities (full list on the Virtual Earth Team’s blog).

It also brings a new feature to Virtual Earth which also powers Live Search Maps: “hill shades”. The hill shading feature allows the user viewing a road-style map to convey elevation on the maps.

The above screenshot is of Mt. St. Helens in Washington State on Live Search Maps. You can see the shading effects allow you to get an idea of elevation. Hill shading is the term the Virtual Earth Team is using but I’m not entirely sure if that is the official name for this feature.

I’ve relied heavily on Live Search Maps most of this year during my travels and also when I drive up to Redmond from Portland. I continue to use Live Search Maps for most of my mapping needs.