World Wide Telescope

This service was launched about an hour ago!

The World Wide Telescope is a "single rich application portal that blends terabytes of images, information, and stories from multiple sources over the Internet into a seamless, immersive, rich media experience. Kids of all ages will feel empowered to explore and understand the universe with its simple and powerful user interface."

Looks cool, but you need some serious hardware and software -- here are the requirements...

• Microsoft® XP SP2 (minimum), Windows® Vista® (recommended)
• PC with Intel Core 2 Duo processor with 2 gigahertz (GHz) or faster, recommended
  1 gigabyte (GB) of RAM; 2 GB RAM recommended
• 3D accelerated card with 128 megabytes (MB) RAM; discrete graphics card with dedicated 256-MB VRAM recommended for higher performance
• 1 GB of available hard disk space; 10 GB recommended for off-line features and higher performance browsing