Another educational project from Microsoft, Worldwide Telescope is an online planetarium with maps and photos of the night sky.

The main view shows all the major constellations along with guide lines. A 3D compass at the bottom of the screen helps orientate the view correctly. Double-clicking on a star zooms the view to show more detail.

This is all well and good but those new to astronomy will be grateful for the guided tours. These are recordings made by experts demostrating objects and events in the night sky. They do not take long to download and are very interesting.

The system requirements for this software are quite demanding, including a dual-core processor. We ran it on a 3Ghz single core Pentium 4 and without any major problems. It was a little slow at times but not unbearably so.

There are also plenty of tours that can be downloaded and watched. They are a great way to get the most from the various deep-space images.