"Any Star Trek fan knows that space travel is not always easy, but Microsoft wants to make travelling the "final frontier" as simple as turning on your computer.
The world's largest software maker launched a free software application called WorldWide Telescope on Monday that allows everyone from space novices to astronomy professors easily explore galaxies, star systems and distant planets.
The WorldWide Telescope stitches together 12 terabytes - the data equivalent of 2.6 billion pages of text - of pictures from sources including the Hubble Space Telescope, the Chandra X-Ray Observatory and the Spitzer Space Telescope.
The experience is similar to playing a video game, allowing users to zoom in and out of galaxies that are thousands of light years away. It allows seamless viewing of far-away star systems and rarely-seen space dust in breathtaking clarity.
A test version of the software is available for download here.
Microsoft archrival Google also has its eyes to the skies. Google Sky started as an add-on to Google Earth but was later upgraded to a version that could be used through a Web browser. Google's version is also free."
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