Now, use Google Earth to scan the Heavens
In a step that will keep amateur astronomers delighted, Google is unveiling within Google Earth a new service called Sky that will allow users to view the skies as seen from Earth. Like Google Earth, Sky will let users fly around and zoom in, exposing increasingly detailed imagery of some 100 million stars and 200 million galaxies, A “backyard astronomy” layer highlights stars, galaxies and nebulae that are visible to the naked eye, with binoculars or with small telescopes.
“You will be able to browse into the sky like never before,” said Carol Christian, an astronomer with the Space Telescope Science Institute, a nonprofit academic consortium that supports the Hubble Space Telescope.
Google said that it developed the project strictly because some of its engineers were interested in it, and that it had no plans to make money from it for now.
“It’s merely about getting new kinds of information out there for the public,” said Chikai Ohazama, a Google Earth project manager.
As with Google Earth, individual users and organizations will be able to overlay photographs, annotations and other kinds of data on top of Sky’s basic images and make them available to others as layers — called mash-ups.
Sky already has layers showing various constellations, a user’s guide to galaxies, the position of planets two months into the future and animations of lunar positions.
[Via]
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