I have used Celestia, which is great to view space from anywhere, and plan to try Stellarium tonight.

For me, am happy using Celestia and maybe Stellarium, but for my 10 year daughter who has just started asking questions about the night sky, I think WWT will be great. Eye candy has a certain appeal to her.

The whole memory/network hog issue, yea WWT does suffer from that, but for my hardware and broadband, I think it is manageable.

What will be really interesting is my wife how has returned to college is taking astronomy next fall. I wonder which, if any she will find useful?

Also, I was really impressed with the WWT to be honest. The Register article linked about is typically poor. Because I have played a game on my PC in the last 2 years I already had DirectX 9.0c, and I already had .NET 2.0 because I write software in it. Obviously this doesn’t apply to most users but since both packages are relevant to some aspects of modern computing on Windows, dismissing those downloads as the “obligatory Redmond bolt-on download hiatus” shows their typical tendency to whine rather than learn.

I didn’t find it to be a resource hog on my year old machine either.

Maybe I’m just lucky. Or don’t pack my machine full of malware and porn so it actually still runs well.

http://winehq.org/

The It emulates the APIs so that WindowsApplication can run.

I don’t know if it’s just me but the imagery isn’t working that well - pictures of eta carinae don’t appear when i click on the link…seems like another one of those betas that are just neutered of what they’re advertised to be…

First off, the webpage works in Mac/Safari and Mac/FF3b5. The webpage had bad trouble in Win/Safari and killed the network connections in my XP2 VM.

After restarting, everything worked. I downloaded WWT with IE7. Installed and ran without a hitch in XP2 with VMware Fusion.

Didn’t have time to extensively test it, but it runs fine (with measly 512k RAM assigned to the VM). Looks like a flashier version of the old NASA WorldWind.