Online business Toolkit

Story: Microsoft launches space tours on the web

• 
• 

Interface designed by people who only look through telescopes

The pictures are beautiful but, like Google Sky, the interface seems to have been designed by someone who has never looked at the sky except through a telescope. Without some idea of simple terrestrial concepts like East and West, there is no way to relate all the beautiful pictures to the sky I see off my balcony. For instance, is that Venus? I did set up the location parameter to be my city but I still could not tell what compass direction corresponded to the display and it was not possible to get a view of visible stars I could correlate with what I was actually seing.

There is also no way to show only stars above a certain magnitude which would make some kind of sense out of the sketch outlines of the constellations. I could see a bright line which was apparently the Milky Way but the object finder would only point out invisible stars while neglecting the biggest object in our vicinity.

Without a real-world sky and a translation of Right Ascension, etc. into common terrestrial coordinates (I know it is complicated but it is ONLY math, which is why we have computers), you might as well just list the pictures and provide text search. Pretending that you are zooming around the universe doesn't work when you can't even see the stars

• 
• 

• 
• 
• 

Full Talkback thread