It made Scoble cry, and soon it can make you cry too. The website for the latest Microsoft Research project, WorldWide Telescope, is now up at http://wwtelescope.com/. Here's how Robert describes it:

"So, back to the World Wide Telescope. You drag around the sky. There’s Mars. There’s the big dipper. There’s Betelguese. Etc. It’s just like the star party you probably attended in college.

But it has one difference between any telescope you’ve ever looked at.

You can zoom. Zoom. Zoom. Zoom.

We picked a point of light inside the big dipper. Zoom. Zoom. Zoom. Zoom. Holy ***, it’s two galaxies colliding. It looked like a star. Zoom. Zoom. Zoom."

No sign of the download yet, with Scoble saying its in private alpha right now. If you're interested in finding out more, Sunshine posted a bunch of info on it last week. We'll let you know when its open to all.

Update: Thanks to Scoble's Twitter, here's the embed of the TED talk featuring WorldWide Telescope:

http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/224

Update2: Thanks to the pointer in the comments, there's also a small screenshot now up on the WorldWide Telescope website.