Redmond, Washington — Astronomy geeks will get a kick out of a new Bing Maps application that was introduced today in conjunction with Microsoft’s World Wide Telescope. A Microsoft architect who formulated an application that lets you stargaze from Bing Map’s street level view.
The Microsoft search engine already assists consumers to find their way to the grocery store or dentist, but now Chris Pendleton informs in a blog post how it can be used to locate the stars and planets overhead.
WWT Bing Maps will enable you to see a representation of the sky above you providing real time information from any location about how the space is moving over the Earth. You can navigate the heavens the same way you do Bing Maps by grabbing an area and dragging the map around (now a universe map).
Upon launching the WWT Bing Maps App, you can enable a telescope pointer, which you can drag onto the map — go to street level, then pan the camera up. The lighting will dim on the buildings and streets surrounding you and the stars will become visible in the sky, with several customizable overlay options. you may get so excited and just want to see SOMETHING, so just jump right in with stars. You can use it to identify constellations, planets and other objects of interest in the night sky.
In addition, the application is bundled with numerous “collections” of data from the Worldwide Telescope Community, including Constellations, Solar System, All-Sky Surveys, Spitzer Studies, Chandra Studies, Hubble Studies, Astrophotography, Radio Studies, NOAO Studies, Gemini Studies, Messier Catalog, Planets/Moons, Earth (Bing), Panoramas, and Tours.
You can click on a collection, which zips you down to Earth and changes the map style to Streetside (where available). Once you are on the ground, just look up. You will see both your street and the heavenly bodies above. You can navigate the universe the same way you do Bing Maps by grabbing an area and dragging the map around (now a universe map). Cool!
There are millions of sites for enthusiastic astronomers out there already, and two years ago Google enabled a star-browsing feature in Google Earth, but it only worked in the desktop application (as opposed to maps.google.com) and it was not integrated with Google’s own street view feature.
The feature works in both Internet Explorer and Firefox as long as Silverlight is installed, but not in Google Chrome. You can try it out for yourself at Bing Maps and then clicking on the Map Apps link at the bottom of the page. Happy web-stargazing!
More on how Bing Maps is evolving from this TED talk earlier this year. You can see how the integration works with the WorldWide Telescope in minute seven of the video.