The story of the WorldWide Telescope

The WorldWide Telescope was first shown to the public at TED 2008 , in a joint presentation by project leader Curtis Wong, manager of Next Media Research for Microsoft, and Roy Gould, a science educator with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. In this interview they discuss how -- and why -- the WorldWide Telescope combines many sources of astronomical data and imagery to create a seamless view of the night sky. Curtis Wong Roy Gould CW : I was interested in astronomy as a kid, but when you grow up in Los Angeles, the odds of seeing the Milky Way are pretty slim. I think the only time it happened recently was during the quake when...