Get ready for more interstellar signposts. Astronomers have directly spotted no less than three planets orbiting a star that sits 130 light-years from Earth. The three gas giants are 10 to seven times the size of Jupiter, with their parent star weighing in at 1.5 times the mass of our sun. Both the Gemini North telescope and W.M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii helped scope out the planets through infrared light.

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Snug in Earth’s orbit, Hubble is free from the background glare that earthly telescopes must fight to see the stars. This allows its supersensitive camera to take better photos of galaxies farther away—and thus much dimmer—than any optical telescope on the ground can. But despite being closer to the moon than any other telescope, there’s no way the scope could snap a photo of that one small step man took 40 years ago.

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Today marks the 18th anniversary of the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope, and to celebrate, NASA has released a collection of 59 new Hubble images (under the fantastic title "Galxies Gone Wild!") that present galaxies in all of their volatile wonder.

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Playing with Google Earth is an immensely gratifying experience. You swoop in like a superhero and pan around as though you're hovering over your own house. Imagine if you were able to do all that in the other direction, out into space. This spring, Microsoft is poised to release the World Wide Telescope, which promises to do just that and more, on a scale of galactic proportions.

Microsoft has assembled an application of tremendous depth and breadth using data from the Hubble and land-based telescopes around the world.

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Courtesy NASA
In what is being touted as the Internets largest digital image
ever, two software engineers have posted an ultra-high-resolution
picture of the Earths surface as a demo of their high-res-image-serving software. The 3.7-gigapixel image—weighing in at approximately 10.7 gigabytes—is taken from NASAs Blue Marble
program, which uses Earth-imaging satellites to extensively photograph
and study the planet. The software, which was originally commissioned
by London's National Gallery to serve zoomable large-scale images of
artwork over the Web, divides the main image into thousands of smaller
mosaic tiles and serves them as needed depending on the location and
zoom level relative to the original image. The system is also used to
display images from the Hubble telescope, which can be zoomed in on to
reveal ridiculous levels of detail.

Its amazing to think that for all but a fraction of world history,
no one knew what the planet Earth looked like from space. And now, a
detailed satellite view of practically every inch of the planet—previously
available only to privileged government agencies—is accessible to
anyone through the Web. —John Mahoney

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