One of the cooler things on or off this planet is an open source project called the World Wide Telescope at: http://worldwidetelescope.org/

It is a free (as in beer and in speech) project under the auspices of the .NET foundation http://www.dotnetfoundation.org/. Here is the intro to their description:

“WorldWide Telescope is a visualization environment that enables a computer to function as a virtual telescope—bringing together archival imagery from the world’s best ground- and space-based telescopes for the exploration of the Universe-”

you can try it out with the webclient html 5 viewer here; http://worldwidetelescope.org/webclient/.

The current installer requires >NET and Windows 7 or better. MAC user will need Parallels or equivalent.  It is open source and Mono does support .NET 4 http://www.mono-project.com/docs/about-mono/compatibility/ so some ambitious Linux developer should be able to port it to that platform.

In the mean time just use the webclient in your favorite browser. It is awesome

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