Description:
Deep Space Explorer is a CD-ROM package that takes stargazing a step further, perhaps a little in the mold of the Starship Enterprise--like Star Trek, the package allows us to venture into uncharted celestial territories without leaving home. Using excellent graphics and color images of stars and moons, the software places the user at the helm of their very own "starship," allowing them to navigate into the outer reaches of the universe. The range of the program gives a hint of the sheer enormity of space. With this software you can travel anywhere within 700 million light years of Earth--probably enough for most of us--visiting 28,000 galaxies and 30,000 individual stars. Navigating through the deep blackness, only to find yourself in the silvery whirl of a spiral galaxy, is a beautiful and unusual virtual experience. In addition to this extraordinary--and literally otherworldly--voyage, though, Deep Space Explorer provides important sources of information, with links connecting to Internet sites that provide more material about the locations you are visiting and multimedia tutorials from a professional astronomer on current cosmological theory and a wide range of topics in astrophysics. These give an interesting understanding of the nature of black holes, galactic collisions, and ideas about the big bang--while being perfectly accessible to the layperson. They also mean that in each of the 28,000 galaxies that you enter the most up-to-date information about this star collection is available at the click of a mouse. This combination of disparate learning and intense virtual exploration of space is difficult to beat. Computers can do many wonderful things, and surely bringing the extent of the universe to so many more people is among them. Now it is no longer necessary to travel to observatories in the American deserts or the Chilean Andes to gain some understanding of the distant stars. --Toby Green
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