Recomputing the Sky

An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft has unveiled the largest and clearest image of the night sky ever assembled. This so-called 'TeraPixel' sky map was generated with the help of some of Microsoft's latest HPC and parallel software assets. Quoting: 'Compared to the old sky image, the TeraPixel version is much more refined. With all the artifacts, seams and inconsistencies processed away, it looks like a true unified image of the sky above. It's like going from Super Mario Brothers on 1985-era Nintendo consoles to Halo 2 on Xbox 360s.'" You can view the image at Microsoft's WorldWide Telescope site — it requires the Silverlight plugin for Windows or Mac. No word at the site about Linux or whether Moonlight works there.

Comments

Getting ready for the MS bash

[capnchicken]

So this looks like a really cool thing that MS did, so I'm going to wait in wide eyed anticipation at how the slashdot community is going to trash it because it's from Microsoft and not Google (or at least be more overly critical of it). I do hope I'm wrong though.

Re:Getting ready for the MS bash

[Anonymous Coward]

It is a cool thing, yes. It is, however, NOT cool that it requires Silverlight to view. There's no reason it should require that.

Re:Getting ready for the MS bash

[Mongoose Disciple]

Playing devil's advocate -- it's pretty trivial to make a Silverlight interface to pan and zoom around a giant image like this. It's less trivial to do the same thing with, say, JavaScript or Flash.

This is one of the handful of things that Silverlight does really well.

Because of that, I wouldn't be surprised if this project was less a "We've got this cool thing, what Microsoft technology can we push with it?" and more "What's a thing we could do that would really show off a strength of Silverlight?"

Re:Getting ready for the MS bash

[xlotlu]

Playing devil's advocate -- it's pretty trivial to make a Silverlight interface to pan and zoom around a giant image like this. It's less trivial to do the same thing with, say, JavaScript or Flash.

Actually you're trolling more than playing devil's advocate. There's a sh*tload of zoom & pan-enabled image viewing libraries, both in JS and Flash, all using tiles just like Silverlight -- try to google some.

And for that matter it's trivial to DIY from scratch using canvas, which of course IE conveniently doesn't support, but that problem was solved too long ago. OpenLayers, which you might have seen at work at OpenStreetMap, includes a VML rendering backend, besides canvas and SVG.

The really funny part about your "advocating" is that MS has an Ajax library that does exactly the same thing as its Silverlight counterpart: http://www.seadragon.com/developer/ajax/

Re:Getting ready for the MS bash

[Locutus]

Except that Silverlight is probably _why_ they did it in the first place. Flash and standardized HTML5 are threats to Windows and without Windows Microsoft is history so Silverlight is the hammer, the night sky is but one nail. Is there an iPhone or Android app for that? I didn't think so but you can bet that when they ship the next new Microsoft phone software, they'll release one for it.

20 years of watching these people operate points me to these kinds of conclusions.

LoB

Where's the JPEG? BMP? PNG? ANYTHING?

[InsertWittyNameHere]

Are there normal image files we can download? I'm not installing Silverlight just to see pictures...

I can view the image?

[benwiggy]

You can view the image at Microsoft's WorldWide Telescope site — it requires the Silverlight plugin for Windows or Mac.

These two statements appear to contradict each other.

If it requires Silverlight, then I can't view it, because I don't want that cock on my computer.

Re:It's now clear where M$ is headed to!

[Hijacked Public]

Help me understand how installing a free broswer plugin distributed by Microsoft, in order to view a single image on a web site, constitutes selling my soul.

Re:It's now clear where M$ is headed to!

[erroneus]

My initial reaction to seeing mention of silverlight was "well damn..." If I were running Windows, I still would not install silverlight. So now I am here seeking to find if anyone has ripped the data accessible through silverlight and converted it or made it available in some other way.

Re:It's interesting where a lot of the time went

[clone53421]

They must have been using Vista Explorer pre SP-1 to do the file copy.

Hmm? Transferring 802 GB over a 1 Gbps link is going to take 1.78 hours as a bare minimum and assuming you lose some time on the overhead and don’t necessarily have 100% of the network’s bandwidth available to you the whole time, 2.5 hours doesn’t seem terribly long.

Re:Beware...

[The_mad_linguist]

That's FOX's job.

Re:Moonlight 3.0.40818.0 on Linux here

[vegiVamp]

You keep well away of all the other inferior products, and then you go for american 'beer' ?

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:It's now clear where M$ is headed to!

[Chris Burke]

Yes, trolling slashdot nerds to install silverlight to view the image out of uncontrollable curiousity.

Someone at M$ is now chuckling while you sell your soul clicking "install silverlight plugin": trolled hard.

It already worked on me when Microsoft put a series of Richard Feynman lectures online. Alas, Moonlight is too "advanced" to load the app. T_T

And I'm not getting trolled all the way into installing a MS operating system!

Requires Silverlight? Yeah you can shove that

[StuartHankins]

Interesting until I saw it required Silverlight. Microsoft is getting really desperate trying to find a way to push Silverlight, so they throw a lot of money into research or science but bada-bing the requirement is you must use their software. It's not altruism when the planned result is sales of your product, it's an investment.

I already have Flash and that's bad enough, thank you, I don't need two companies competing for who can screw me the hardest.

Re:Google Maps

[Atzanteol]

Google:
There's some latency as the site fetches images and scales images. Overall works pretty well.

Bing:
The site asks me to download and install Silverlight.exe which doesn't work on my operating system.

Perhaps I'm not as easily impressed as you?