The Hubble Space Telescope and (below) a whirlpool galaxy

If you look at the history of science, you would find that it is replete with names of great amateurs. Think of Gregor Mendel, C.V. Raman, Michael Faraday and Albert Einstein before they became famous. They did not hold jobs as scientists or professors, but nonetheless made lasting contributions to science. By the 20th century, this breed had started dying out. Now it is almost extinct, except probably in one branch of science: astronomy.

Astronomy can still be practised in your backyard, and it won’t even be expensive. All you need is a telescope. You could look at planets, make painstaking observations about their orbits. You could discover comets, peer at variable stars (those that keep varying in brightness) and keep records and take celestial photographs. Yet, there is a difference; you have no access to the spectacular images from the world’s best telescopes.

Amateur astronomers can do useful work, but they are far behind the professionals. However, by September this year, they can access most of these professional images, thanks to the World Wide Telescope. This is a virtual observatory that will collect images from some of the best telescopes and make them available to the public at large. They could be used by anyone who is interested in astronomy. The project is aimed at making the subject more enticing, especially to students. Says Curtis Wong, principal researcher at Microsoft, which is the prime mover of the project, “We want to lower the barrier for exploring the universe so that it can be fun.” The Seattle-based company began the project way back in 2002, as part of Microsoft Research, the division that focuses on blue sky research.

Putting images of the universe online for public viewing is not as easy as it sounds. The universe is an enormously huge place. In fact, nobody even knows how huge it is. We can see probably for about 45 billion light years in any direction around us. This is enough space for about one hundred billion galaxies, each with stars varying from 10 million to one trillion in numbers. Powerful telescopes keep scanning this universe and come up with millions of photographs each year. It is way beyond the power of a human being to analyse them manually. It would take years to even look at one evening’s observation. No astronomer can stare at a picture and spot an anomaly. The computer has to do this job.

So all these images are fed into a computer and then analysed. It is a difficult exercise even for a computer because of the sheer volume of data. Moreover, the amount of astronomy data that we have keeps doubling every year. The rate of growth itself is increasing. To provide a meaningful sample of astronomy today, the virtual telescope has to have a wide repertoire. It has to satisfy online queries from amateur or even professional astronomers. And that is not an easy job.

The World Wide Telescope would start with images from a project called the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, an internationally-funded effort to map as much of the universe as possible. When completed, it is supposed to map one-fourth of the sky, and provide three-dimensional images of a million galaxies and quasars (supposedly nuclei of young galaxies). It completed its first phase in 2005, by which time it had mapped 200 million objects in the sky. The second phase will be complete by the year 2008. All the images would be available through the World Wide Telescope, which will initially also have images from the US Navy.

All these images have been captured by light telescopes. But astronomers use images taken by X-ray and infrared telescopes as well.

The World Wide Telescope will add these images later. It is now talking to Nasa to add images from the Hubble Telescope. So by the time the telescope is launched, it would have become a massive database. There is only one difference from what the professionals use — it would take a few months for the data to be processed and made available online.