World Wide Telescope

[renormalised (Carl)]

Most of my really old computers are now long gone, but I still have an old Osbourne that runs with a Pentium 100, 32MB of EDO, 4GB HDD and Win95

I still play around with it ocassionally, run it with Claris Works and Paintshop Pro (v4.0). Still does what you want with it

[programmer]

Originally Posted by renormalised

Most of my really old computers are now long gone, but I still have an old Osbourne that runs with a Pentium 100, 32MB of EDO, 4GB HDD and Win95

I still play around with it ocassionally, run it with Claris Works and Paintshop Pro (v4.0). Still does what you want with it

Pentium? That's not 'old'

I remember our first batch of Pentium 60's in '94, with the floating point CPU bug... I was doing virtual reality at the time and that kind of needs accurate floating point calculations! Now no more off-topic!

[wavelandscott (Scott)]

In what prove to be a futile attempt to get the thread back on topic...

I downloaded the program last night at home...installation was a snap with no dramas.

While I did not get a chance to try all of the whizz-bang features available, what I saw and did use I very much enjoyed. Looks like there are some nifty teaching tools incorporated in the program.

[programmer]

Originally Posted by wavelandscott

In what prove to be a futile attempt to get the thread back on topic...

I downloaded the program last night at home...installation was a snap with no dramas.

While I did not get a chance to try all of the whizz-bang features available, what I saw and did use I very much enjoyed. Looks like there are some nifty teaching tools incorporated in the program.

I guess comparisons with Google Sky will be in order.. I notice WWT has Ascom support which is interesting. I'll stick with AstroPlanner for the moment though! Can get DSS images at will through that if need be. I know my kids will love it though.. they are already into Google Sky, Stellarium, Starry Night..

[tornado33]

Typical microsoft bloatware! The minimum system requirements are horrendous. Most PC'ss out there cannot run it. Now, if someone like Photoncollector wrote the software, it would run 10X faster, and do so on a celeron with < 512mb ram and be in a download package 1/4 of what it is now

[Omaroo (Chris Malikoff)]

Originally Posted by tornado33

Typical microsoft bloatware! The minimum system requirements are horrendous. Most PC'ss out there cannot run it. Now, if someone like Photoncollector wrote the software, it would run 10X faster, and do so on a celeron with < 512mb ram and be in a download package 1/4 of what it is now

It's actually not as bad as you may think. The subject matter is uhmm.. rather big and they've actually done a good job keeping the base application as small as they have. Saying that - it was only a 20Mb download - which may be too much for those of you who'd have us believe you were still running on a 9600 baud modem. LOL! For everyone else on broadband it's a couple of minutes-worth.

I'm running it successfully (read: fast) on my lowly 2GHz Athlon with 1Gb of RAM. You don't need the "recommended" machine config to run it well.

Anyway - here are a couple of screenshots from tonight. The first one is with me choosing to overlay the galactic Ha map down and look at the Eta Carinae region. These two screenshots give you a really limited idea of how good this thing really is.

[tnbk00 (Daniel)]

Its it just me or does everyone have this image. Looks like its out of focus.....good chance to star test the world wide telescope and check the collimation

[Barrykgerdes]

I have down loaded and installed this program three times on two different computers. I have yet to see anything but a white screen with constellation lines. I may be awfully dumb but what do you need to do to get it to do something?

Barry