telescope

Microsoft on Wednesday gave TED conference-goers--an audience typically filled with stars like Goldie Hawn or Forest Whitaker--a close-up of real celestial bodies with its new virtual telescope.

Microsoft demonstrated long-awaited software called WorldWide Telescope to an audience at the exclusive Technology Entertainment and Design conference in Monterey, Calif., a four-day confab that started Wednesday. It's unclear whether the demo of the astronomy technology made anyone in the audience cry like former Microsoft evangelist Robert Scoble, but the images (shown above) were certainly stellar.

WorldWide Telescope, similar to the sky feature in Google Earth but much more expansive, is a … Read more

Is flying through outer space from the comfort of your living room enough to make you cry?

It is for former Microsoft evangelist Robert Scoble. A couple weeks back he said on his blog that a new Microsoft technology made him cry. He didn't give many details, citing a confidentiality agreement, but he provided enough there for folks to connect the dots.

My new boss, Dan Farber, correctly predicted that it was an updated version of the WorldWide Telescope program, a fact later confirmed by TechCrunch.

Microsoft researcher Curtis Wong showed an early version of the telescope software at … Read more

A project to develop the world's most powerful telescope on a mountaintop in Chile has received a $30 million infusion from Microsoft founder Bill Gates and former Microsoft executive Charles Simonyi. In the last week, the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) Project, a public-private venture to build a telescope to detect dark matter and dark energy that's accelerating the universe's expansion, said it received a $20 million gift from Simonyi's Fund for Arts and Sciences and another $10 million from Gates.

The LSST, expected to be completed in 2014, will include three large mirrors and a … Read more

Astronauts on the moon may one day pour themselves a liquid telescope to gaze at distant galaxies.

Scientists have proposed using a liquid compound to craft a giant disc-shaped mirror that would be capable of reflecting objects that are undetectable by other telescopes, according to a paper published this week in the journal Nature. With much less expense than transporting a solid mirror, the liquid would be carried in a drum and poured over a disc-shaped mesh that unfurls robotically, according the paper. Surface tension on the mesh would prevent the liquid from dripping through its small holes, according to … Read more

One of the more popular gadgets on the market these days is the home planetarium, and Crave has responded with items ranging from the handheld version to egg-shaped aliens. But all these pale in comparison to the Meade RCX400 with its robotic Max Mount--a combined 500 pounds of star-gazing equipment.

As any amateur Galileo will tell you, it's nearly impossible to get a decent image of the heavens because of exposure issues and planet rotation. The solution, according to OhGizmo, is a robotic mount like this one that can track objects in the sky while they're moving.… Read more

The people at Gadget Universe have some impressive products, but we can only hope that good intentions went into their conceptualization. Last week, we learned that they were selling a pair of 10x digital camera binoculars. Now, we find out that they're offering a telescope with a built-in 3.1-megapixel camera.

The product description talks about such innocent uses as sports, wildlife and vacation photography. But as we all know, any telescope can have entirely different applications in an urban setting, especially one with a lot of uncovered windows around. This one, which goes for $440, magnifies up to … Read more