Slashgeo

The Digital Earth Blog posted an article with about this. From their summary : "According to TechCrunch, Microsoft is set to unveil a product called “Worldwide Telescope” on February 27. "

"Users will be able to pan around the nighttime sky and zoom as far in to any one area as the data will allow. Microsoft is said to be tapping the Hubble telescope as well as ten or so earth bound telescopes around the world for data. When you find an area you like, you can switch to a number of different views, such as infrared and non-visible light."

For a more detailed summary and a link to the original article, please visit the Digital Earth Blog.

Slashdot has all the information about this. This is most follow up to the Google Sky product MSFT was working on. There is a pretty good video demonstration, so please visit slashdot to get the link and discussion items.

Update : I just noticed Ogle Earth has a great review of the whole thing. Please visit their page for a highly detailed overview.
Update : The Google Earth Blog has also done an extensive review of this. Check out their page for more information.

Here is their summary : "Ted.com has a great sneak peek at Microsoft's new WorldWide Telescope project. In this video, presented by Roy Gould and Curtis Wong, you are able to see a combined view of satellites and telescopes from all over the planet and nearby space. The compiled image is rendered using Microsoft's new high-performance "Visual Experience Engine" that allows users to pan and zoom across the night sky seamlessly."

From the Map Room blog : "Digital Earth Blog notes reports that Microsoft’s WorldWide Telescope may be released by the end of this month — or at least Bill Gates has been quoted saying that it will. I’ll be very interested to know the system requirements."

In case you are not familiar with World Wide Telescope, please check out this relevant story article.

SlashDot is currently discussing this new nasa mosaic. Here is their summary : "Today NASA unveiled a new infrared mosaic of our galaxy. The result of over 800,000 individual images collected by the Spitzer Space Telescope, it is the largest, highest-resolution, and most sensitive infrared picture ever taken of the Milky Way (and will likely remain so for the foreseeable future). Because Spitzer sees in infrared, it penetrates much farther into the galaxy, revealing previously hidden star clusters, star-forming regions, shocked gases, glowing 'bubbles' and more. The complete mosaic is about 400,000 by 13,000 pixels, and a 180' printed version is being shown at the American Astronomical Society meeting in St. Louis. A zoomable, annotated version of two different variants on the image (as well as some additional information on the science) is available at Alien Earths, a NASA- and NSF-supported education site."

To be a part of the discussion, head on over to the SlashDot article. To make things easier for you GIS professionals, here are the images in reference to the mosaic :
Single Images, not mosaiced : http://www.spitzer.caltech.edu/Media/releases/ssc2008-11/ssc2008-11b.shtml
Interactive Mosaic : http://www.alienearths.org/glimpse/glimpse.php