Scoble sent tongues in the blogosphere wagging in February when Microsoft showed this to him under NDA. He posted that he saw something so amazing that he couldn't talk about that he just wanted to cry. Microsoft has now announced that it will launch Worldwide Telescope, a tool for exploring images of the night sky, by the end of May, free to anyone who wants to use it, Microsoft's chairman said Friday. What Scoble loved about it was, in his own words, " Zoom out. Zoom out. Zoom out. Zoom out. Pan over to Mars. What a glorious view. You’ve never seen Mars like that through your $2,000 Celestron Telescope."

He also noted that the project was dedicated to Jim Gray, the Microsoft Researcher who sailed out of San Francisco Bay about a year and a half ago never to be heard from again. Gray apparently started this project with a paper back in 2002. This story from IDG News Service notes that Worldwide Telescope is software that allows people to gaze at the universe through the data collected by telescopes all around the world -- and above it: there's even data from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. However, note that the the star-gazing software appears to be similar to Google Sky, which Google launched in August 2007. So Microsoft's Worldwide Telescope may be cool, but it cannot be claimed to be original, or even first

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