The Cosmos is Coming:

“When it comes online in six months to a year, Microsoft’s SkyServer will be the astronomical

equivalent of the company’s popular TerraServer, which catalogs aerial images of the Earth

and is one of the biggest databases on the Internet.

In the same way users of the TerraServer choose a region of the planet and drill down for

pictures of the ground at ever greater resolution, users of the SkyServer will be able choose

a region of the sky and probe deeper and deeper into space…

But unlike the TerraServer, which is essentially a collection of unprocessed pictures, the

SkyServer data will be somewhat ‘cooked’ –- analyzed and catalogued — allowing members

of the public to do science with the data.” [Wired]