Starting today, you don’t have to download any software to your PC to enjoy what Microsoft Research’s WorldWide Telescope has to offer – it’s now available online as a web application! This is good news for folks running non-Windows operating systems who were previously unable to use this amazing tool which lets your computer function as a virtual telescope while bringing together imagery from the best ground and space-based telescopes in the world.

The new WWT web application (alpha) uses Silverlight 2.0 to display the satellite imagery within your browser and it offers most of the features of the desktop application, including the following:

• Access to hundreds of terabytes of sky, earth and planet data
• Ability to navigate seamlessly through 3D spherical environments
• Finder Scope to quickly identify astronomical objects
• Instant thumbnail previews of tens of thousands of popular astronomical objects
• Access to billions of objects in web-based astronomical catalogue
• Loading tours, images and other WorldWide Telescope data files on local machine
• Real-time positions of planets and moons
• Move forwards and backwards in time 2000 years
• View guided tours (without 3D planets)
• Browsing local user collections
• Virtual Observatory Cone search/registry look up and SIMBAD search

Hi All,

We moved Microsoft offices last week here in Christchurch, and as such we needed some additional wiring and electrical work to be done as there wasn’t enough wiring to cater for our needs. One of the ports in my office wasn’t working (it didn’t pass the cabling test with my tester) so I asked the cablers to test all ports in the rooms to ensure they were working as expected. When we pulled the jack off the wall, this is what we found…..

So from the look of it (and from testing) the original cabler/sparky decided that the jackpoints on this wall maybe better suited on the other wall, so daisy chained it to the new jackpoint rather than running another cable from the patch panel… Both jackpoints are 26 and 28.. truely cowboy-ish for a new building install!

Nick.