Whether you are a real space buff or you are simply in awe of all the stars in the sky, the Microsoft World Wide Telescope is sure to amaze you. Once you download and try this free program, you will easily find many descriptive adjectives for the program. Some of the adjectives that I came up with are magnificent, marvelous, spectacular, and awe-inspiring. The program has imagery from the best telescopes in use today, including both ground- and space-based telescopes. The real beauty of the program, however, is how the images are seamlessly integrated to produce a visually powerful and engaging experience. It is like a Web browser for the night sky.

You can zoom in on planets, stars, constellations, and galaxies, exploring the Universe in a freeform manner of your liking. You can take sky tours and can even create your own tours. As you take a tour or explore on your own, you can instantly get information about anything you see.

To start your exploration, there is a tour of how the program works. You will immediately see that its design makes it easy to feel just like a space explorer. As you move through the sky, a navigation pane on the bottom of the screen presents thumbnails of celestial objects.

There are so many different thing that you can do while in the program that you will never be bored. There are many different views that give you different ways to view the sky while always keeping the stars and planets within context to each other. As things come into view you can investigate them and explore in your own time and manner. It's a wonderful way to explore outer space.

The minimum system requirements for a PC to run the WorldWide Telescope program almost turned me away, but I found that the program runs well on a much less powerful system. Microsoft's system requirements are as follows:

• Microsoft® XP SP2 (minimum), Windows® Vista® (recommended)
• PC with Intel Core 2 Duo processor with 2 gigahertz (GHz) or faster, recommended
• 1 gigabyte (GB) of RAM; 2 GB RAM recommended
• 3D accelerated card with 128 megabytes (MB) RAM; discrete graphics card with dedicated 256-MB VRAM recommended for higher performance
• 1 GB of available hard disk space; 10 GB recommended for off-line features and higher performance browsing
• XGA (1024 x 768) or higher resolution monitor
• Microsoft Mouse or compatible pointing and scrolling device
• Microsoft® DirectX® version 9.0c and .NET Framework 2.0

While you do have to have DirectX and the >NET Framework installed on your computer, don't let that turn you away from this program. You are likely to already have installed these. If not, the installation process will walk you through their installation so you don't have to worry about it.

As for the other system requirements, the program looks spectacular if you have a new computer with those specs, but you really don't need all that power. I ran the WorldWide Telescope on a 3 GHz, Pentium 4 with 512 MB of RAM with good results. If you have a computer less capable than that, this may be a good excuse to purchase a new one.

The WorldWide Telescope lets you experience the awe that you felt as a kid camping out in the backyard and looking up at the sky. I want to offer special thanks to Microsoft for creating this program and making it free for all to enjoy.