posted on Tuesday, May 13, 2008 9:48 AM
by
paul
SkyServer
WorldWide Telescope LaunchedI was in San Francisco back in February 2002 for the Launch of Visual Studio and when it can time for lunch I found a seat and sat down next to Jim Gray. He was discussing with a friend problems with some of the servers at his Microsoft Research Lab and I interrupted with a short dissertation on the value of quality motherboards. Jim looked me in the eye and said
you're a hardware guy and I said
shhhh, don't tell anybody. We talked about many things over the next hour, but mostly astronomy, my childhood memories of the Haydon Planetarium and Jim's SkyServer project.
I've downloaded Microsoft's new
WorldWide Telescope and with my AMD Quad Core Phenom system with a 32" LCD it's an amazing experience. I'm traveling around our universes spiral galaxies, picturesque nebula and pulsating quasars thanks to the gamma ray burst of spirit that was Jim Gray.