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At the same time, with the evolution of Virtual Earth 3D and Live Search Maps, the Redmond giant also married its online mapping, location and search platform with the WorldWide Telescope project from Microsoft Research. Virtual Earth Tech Evangelist Microsoft Live Search Chris Pendleton pointed out that Virtual Earth was now “full of stars,” courtesy of the WorldWide Telescope.

“I haven't talked about WorldWide Telescope since it launched; but, since Microsoft Virtual Earth is a part of that Microsoft Research project I thought it would interest some of you that we decided to include some of the WorldWide Telescope into Virtual Earth. Did you know that the Virtual Earth data centers host all of the data for WWT and that the actual Earth in WWT are Virtual Earth tiles? Well, now you do,” Pendleton revealed.

Developed by Curtis Wong and Jonathan Fay, who built on the concept put together by Jim Gray, the former researcher and manager of Microsoft Research's eScience Group, WorldWide Telescope is designed to transform a desktop into a virtual telescope. The WorldWide Telescope was already a hybrid because of the Virtual Earth content it integrated. But with the latest update, so is Virtual Earth, now with its sky full of WorldWide Telescope stars.

“So, what did we take from WWT? The constellations. More specifically, the stars. In the latest release of the Virtual Earth 3D control, we included the accurate placement of stars in space. The stars are drawn leveraging the Hipparcos catalogue and differ based on magnitude and color. The Hipparcos (HIgh Precision PARallax COllecting Satellite) catalog is the de facto measurement of the stellar parallax and the proper motion of the stars,” Pendleton added.

Virtual Earth 3D is available for download here.