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Google Earth Gets Star-Gazing Add On
Tom F writes to mention BBC News is reporting that Google has released a new add on for Google Earth that will allow users to search a 3D rendition of over 1 million stars and 200 million galaxies called Google Sky. "Optional layers allow users to explore images from the Hubble Space Telescope as well as animations of lunar cycles. [...] Users can overlay the night sky with other information such as galaxies, constellations and detailed images from the Hubble Space Telescope. Imagery for the system came from six research institutions including the Digital Sky Survey Consortium, the Palomar Observatory in California and the United Kingdom Astronomy Technology Centre. "
...a bit like this? except for open source. hu. now, what should motivate me using the google-tool?
Let's hope that its as useful (eventually) to amateurs as google earth is to geologists.
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
I remember seeing a 3D Java app from some NASA (or some NASA-related website) where you could view, in simulated real-time, the position of all the known satellites that are currently orbiting the Earth. It included the ISS, and Mir before it was brought down. I wonder if Google has any plan to incorporate that kind of thing into their application. It would be pretty cool if I could zoom into my house, and see (real-time if possible) what satellites were passing over my house just by zooming out enough.
And they said zombies weren't real!
No, why would someone who runs linux want to know what the outside looks like?
http://www.stoff.pl/
Someone please mod parent +1 Funny.
My answer to your question: you can't slide beer under the door!
The game.
Google Map, Google Earth, Google Sky.. I think it leads to Google Mind.
Imagine (ho ho!) what would hpapen if Google were to invest in thought-imaging technlogoy, in order to accurately represent thought processes. People would have G-Implants (tm) in their brain recording their thoughts for others ot peruse!
It's coming. Just you wait...
I never spellcheck and I freely admit it. Save your karma for more worthwhile "lol erorrs" replies
According to these guys, google sky is (like google earth) stitched together actual photographs.
Could be more accurate than a generated model.
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
I told my kids about the upcoming eclipse, and I was excited to see them enthusiastic, until one said "What channel will it be on?"
The article doesn't have a download link, and a Google search turns up nothing. Where's the link?
Just a month ago (July/12) ... GoogleSky .. talking about scanning astronomical plates.
The curious thing is that the .com domain was registered just on Jun/29!, and the domain name servers seems not to be updated yet (Aug/22), the basename url (googlesky.com) leads to a page stating the domain name is still on sale!. Vacation time at Google perhaps?
On another front, will GoogleSky add a time shift scroll control to the pages? Astronomical data can be computed if no image is available...
What's in a sig?
Google can map 200 million galaxies in 3-D but can't come up with a road map of Mexico? What's up?
Applying this funny-once-upon-a-time-question to a service is retarded. Please go away.
Can someone show me the directions to Tattoine? Most people know about those "faces" you can find in Google Earth, hills that looks like indians etc. I guess we will be seeing star "faces", possible UFO's and Elvis very soon.
Next thing you know, they'll be spotting green gelatinous blobs suntanning nude on the liquid-metal beaches of Upsilon Andromedae b's fourth moon.
May I suggest an excellent application called Celestia. Quite wonderful an experience to use. It's using a 3D interface and lets you navigate our solar system and stars in our galaxy (some 120,000 stars). It has extensions, so you can load packs of new objects and functionality, e.g. satellites orbiting the earth and so on.
More info on Wikipedia and of course Celestia's homepage.
It is available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.
Fight for your digital freedom, join the EFF *now*: http://www.eff.org/support/
SDSS (Sloan Digital Sky Servey) has been in World Wind over a year now. And Stellarium is still the best way to properly look at the sky from a computer. You have no true reference points in the GE Sky.. it is just a "pretty viewer".
Now scientist can just use google to find darkmatter/ET/Extra solar planets
In the not too distant future, next Sunday A.D.
The first thing I thought of when i zoomed out fully of google earth was, "they should really make a app for that sky. Its just where that sort of thing should go..."
There are already some great planetarium software applications available, like Stellarium. I see that it could be "more convenient" if Google Earth offered similar views, but I can't help but think that with the patchwork quality of Google Maps/Earth data, that the sky dataset will look like another half-finished project.
I may joke that in Google Sky, Rigel appears to be "(c) google" and Sirius will be a hotlink for digital radio, but there's a more serious concern of incomplete, poorly matched, patchwork quality, license-encumbered imagery that will blunt the value of Google Sky if they're not careful. Since Google's an ad company, I fail to see how this will actually bring them more revenue.
[
If Han Solo had only had this software he could have mapped out the best route and made the Kessel Run in 9 parsecs.
And here I thought it was going to be a plug-in that would allow people to track sitings of movie stars, post pictures of Lindsey Lohan's arrest, upload pictures from various weddings, events, etc.
Hmmm, I wonder which would be more popular...
I have only one reaction to this.
"My God, it's full of stars!"
How could he look outside, without Windows?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The issue with Stellarium is that it isn't all 100% real information, its generated information to be somewhat accurate. Sky in Google Earth however contains actual Digital Sky Survey data and Sloan Digital Sky Survey data. Not to mention that the Space Telescope Science Institute (the people who run Hubble) was the primary research institution that worked on the project with Google. This means that besides the ground based digital data, Hubble Space Telescope images are overlayed on the sky as well. Google Sky is an actual real representation of the sky. People who say the project is half finished because the plates aren't stiched together properly are complete idiots, because its impossible to compose one complete image of the sky from thousands of "digital plates" and keep the data accurate. Sky in Google Earth data is 99.9999% accurate, and is only off by like half an arcsecond in some places.
You should check out Celestia, which runs both on Windows and Linux (and Mac I think). http://www.shatters.net/celestia/ Nice thing about it is that it has a huge library of add-ons that people make from NASA images. IMHO with a little work it's far superior to commercial astronomy programs (such as Starry Night), although my Celestia folder is at about 2 GB right now.
> My answer to your question: you can't slide beer under the door!
Sure you can, you just need to wait for it to go flat.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
... but the zoom effect when you jump from location to location needs some work. When you jump between locations on the surface of the earth the curve the camera follows seems graceful and mostly sedate. When you jump between stellar locations, it's a combination of a bad camera zoom effect, too wide a field of view in an FPS, and finally like your looking down a telescope as it zooms across the sky at maximum magnification.
09F91102 no, 455FE104 nope, F190A1E8 uh-uh, 7A5F8A09 that's not it, C87294CE no. Ah! 452F6E403CDF10714E41DFAA257D313F.
I wish Google would team up with the Celestia people and make GoogleUniverse. It would be awesome to combine Celestia's ability to travel the universe with up-to-date data that could be gathered from Google and also with Google Earth's ability to move in very close to things.
"Empathise with stupidity, and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot." - Iain M. Banks
i, for one, welcome our new google overlords who will allow us to use google sky to view the approach of our new alien overlords.
for making such useful, interesting software for free. Keep up the good work.
Everybody may have seen Hubble's pictures of the Eagle Nebula a million times, but for the first time we'll get to see what it looks like *from the back*!
I just hope they make Google Warp Drive (beta) open source.
Thanks for the info!
"Don't mind me cutting myself on Occam's Razor"
A wikipedia entry describing failure. Yes, Google need to stay out of.. um.. Answering search queries.
Why don't I upgrade to Tiger? Mostly laziness. Plus Spotlight sucks and I was hoping to just skip to Leopard, where maybe Apple will have come to their senses and fixed the damned Spotlight UI.
1: Totally self-contained, i.e. you don't need an Internet connection at all to run Stellarium, let alone broadband.
2: No ads.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
That's a plus from my viewpoint, at least for us westerners. Much more intuitive.
Stellarium and KStars both need manual fixups to get those.
Google LatLong Blog Post
I realize that they have released google mars, and google moon, but these are just web browser based 2D views of the respective celestial bodies. Wouldn't it be cool if they put these into the Google Earth interface? Imagine being able to virtually fly around and see features such as Olympus Mons in 3D?
"When the only tool you own is a hammer, every problem begins to resemble a nail." - Abraham Maslow (1908-1970)
When the only tool you own is a hammer, everything on which you use it begins to resemble a thumb." -- ConceptJunkie (1965 - )
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
... this will make money... how, exactly?
So I tried Google Sky...
I line up good ole Andromeda and look for the nearest Starbucks.
Would you believe not one Starbucks in the whole galaxy?
Can I turn on the light pollution layer so I get a true sense of the Los Angeles sky?
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
I think that Stellarium, Xephem etc. and this new GE feature are targeted pretty much for different uses anyway:
- The Sky feature in GE is nice for general visual ogling around the sky for entertainment purposes; the UI is rather slick and the search functionality seems to cover the popular things (Messier/NGC catalogs etc) quite well. This makes it very attractive for causal wandering around the night sky, especially for people who aren't interested about getting dirty with the details of astronomy (although some information appears to be available with links to Wikipedia pages and various astronomical sources, kudos for that).
- The traditional planetarium applications are generally quite a bit more useful for e.g. planning an observation session ahead with simulation features. It's far easier to look for the first day of year when moon is closer than 5 degress to Pleiades and sun is below horizon in, say, XEphem than in GE. The information databases in planetarium applications often also provide data about things like variable stars/spectral class of a star etc, which are useful for some kinds of amateur astronomy, but not really important for visual enjoyment of hopping around the sky in GE. However, the UIs in planetarium apps do not IMO really provide as slick feeling of cruising around the sky view, as they tend to be functional/informative (stellar magnitudes/spectral classes etc) rather than to provide instant visual enjoyment.
I don't think it's really possible to generally claim either kind of application to be the ultimate solution, at least for now. I wouldn't be surprised if they get closer to each other as time passes, though. Being an amateur astronomer myself, I see the sky feature in GE as something I'll probably not use as often as, say, XEphem, but it's still nice.
Everyone who makes generalizations should be shot.
Wow thanks for mentioning XEphem. I'd not heard of it before. I really love academic software.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
In Soviet Russia, perhaps.
"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity." -- Hanlon's Razor
But how do I make the yellow letters scroll up that tell me what the story is about?
- Yes, I am posting at a -1, and no I will not use a proxy to bypass my circumstances.
We've all used Google Earth to look up our homes. How you can look up Uranus
Will it show planet X?
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