Space Odyssey on your PC

How would you like to zoom across Venus, sail by the pole star and finally drop your anchor at the moon? Well as Microsoft and Google take their battle for digital supremacy up in the galaxies your vehicle to cruise amongst the stars is set to only get better. To start your space expedition, you could take your pick from three 3D virtualization programs for the sky from Microsoft, Google or Stellarium, all of which are currently offering free services.
Google’s service, Google Sky—which initially came as an ‘extra’ for Google Earth and let you look up at the sky, virtually, from the ground—now also comes as an online destination at www.google.com/sky.

On the other hand, Microsoft’s brand new offering with WorldWide Telescope www.worldwidetelescope.org comes with rich graphics and special software to present the images of spherical space objects with less polar distortion. Cruising with World-Wide Telescope, however, requires downloading a hefty piece of software, which of course, runs only on Microsoft Windows.
The third option is Stellarium www.stellarium.org , which is a free open-source program that lets you examine the universe from anywhere in the world, and works in a bunch of languages (no Hindi however).
The experience with these services is as close to visiting an actual galaxy with a visually appealing image-rich environment. These sites let you zoom into an area of the sky as far as the telescope image allows, thus giving you the feeling of actually being there. A simple mouse click can land you on the Moon, Mars, Jupiter as well as the various moons of Jupiter in complete 3D environment. You can also check out panoramas of the sky or the planets taken by spacecraft that have flown there, such as panoramic views of Mars taken by the Rover. Also available are collections of images taken from some of the most famous observatories and planetariums in the world.
WorldWide Telescope also lets you move back in time to the beginning of the common era or move forward another 2,000 years, and view the sky as it was or will be seen from any point on earth, complete with labels on what you’re looking at (stars, constellations and such).
Both Microsoft and Google projects run with many parallel features, however World-Wide Telescope claims that their images are taken from the Hubble Telescope and 10 major earthly satellites, while Google Sky relies mostly on the Hubble.
Microsoft’s services also come with the ASCOM (AStronomy Common Object Model) driver that lets you attach supported hardware—like a telescope—to your computer and record your own images, which you can add to WorldWide Telescope and integrate into your virtual universe. And by the way, while you are on your space journey, you can build your own ‘guided tours’ of the universe and save them. Similarly, with Stellarium you can install user scripts of events that occurred in the past, record presentations, as well as set the earth time for future or past cosmological events.
There is one caveat however: these services might be as wonderful as they sound, but don’t even think of logging on with a low-end configuration. You need a video card capable of accelerated 3D graphics (to display DirectX 9.0 compatible graphics) with over 2 GB RAM at least with WorldWide Telescope.
The easiest way to find out if your computer is ready for WorldWide universe is to check out Microsoft’s terms for the program. If your computer doesn’t meet the standards they’ve set for use, then it’s not for you.
Also, unlike Stellarium and Google Sky, where everyone can feel right at home, the community in WorldWide Telescope claims to be associated with prestigious groups, such as the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. So it might just be a humbling experience to be able to tap into the knowledge provided by these groups while you continue your journey into the universe.