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Directly from Time Magazine: "Like Google Earth for the heavens, WWT aggregates terabytes of astronomical data from the world's biggest telescopes to create a single virtual scope that anyone can look through. WWT is not a model of the known universe, but rather a centralized repository for just about everything known about the universe. The idea is to democratize the science of astronomy with a single tool that can be used by students and scientists. Who knows, when everyone has access to the same data, maybe the next big discovery in astronomy will be made by an amateur? There are hundreds of terabytes of digitized sky - enough data for everyone. "

WorldWide Telescope is Microsoft's answer to Google Earth and Google Sky. It's pretty cool and does a lot of stuff that I don't understand but am sure someone interested in astronomy would love. I look at it and think about using the zooms of planets to have student calculate the size of some features knowing the scale. It's not utilizing the total power of the software, but it gets me in the door, makes it a cool activity for the students, and creates a little love to science in a math class. i can live with that!

Stellarium is a free open source planetarium for your computer. It shows a realistic sky in 3D, just like what you see with the naked eye, binoculars or a telescope.