WorldWide Telescope: Works great on a Mac (if you have Windows)

You might have heard that Microsoft Research has released WorldWide Telescope (WWT), it’s software to devour the universe whole provide a fun way to browse the planets and stars.

The BBC mentioned that you can run WWT on your Mac … so long as you have Windows on your Mac. Sigh. VMWare helpfully gave the system a try, though, and found it worked great (and even posted a video about it.)

I fired up the ol’ Boot Camp and saw it wasn’t bad. It boasts high-resolution photography of many parts of the sky, and is reasonably easy to use (for a Microsoft product). There were some weird, annoying flicker problems, but I’ll chalk that up to the fact that it’s beta software on a MacBook with a pokey graphics card.

As an amateur astronomer with his own 10-inch Dob (that’s right, ladies), I tend to use astronomy software less as a casual browsing tool, but more to find interesting things in the sky on a particular night. And for that, WWT ain’t great. You won’t find any satellites (like Iridium flares) in WWT. Worst of all — there’s no horizon I could easily find. So good luck trying to find that fuzzy thing next to the blue thing when it’s under your feet.

The Mac, however, is blessed with a great variety of native astronomy tools, most of which are free. Stellarium is excellent, free planetarium software. It’s worth noting that Google Earth has a spiffy sky tool built-in, too. Last but not least, Starry Night Pro is the king of all astronomy software (and my favorite), but is a little spendy at $150.

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