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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. "
Stellarium doesn't integrate with maps of the world, that's why. With Stellarium, you specify your location in Lat./Lon. or you specify the location of a known observatory. Then it will show you what the sky will look like at the specified (or current) time of day. With Google Earth, it would be easy to see where the stars are in the sky from anywhere on the planet.
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As if the internet didn't provide enough porn already.
If you download the latest version of Google Earth, it is built-in. There is a button to "Switch between Sky and Earth". Works well so far for me.
Z
2+2=5 for extremely large values of 2
Google demo and info here: http://earth.google.com/sky/skyedu.html
lexbaby
"Be Brave, Be Loyal, Be True." -- Hawkeye Pierce
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.
Google Sky, like Google Earth, will cost them money to set up. However, not that much, as the main infrastructure (huge distributed databases) they have in place already. It only costs them the labour to do so. But that's not bad for Google anyway, because now we're talking about them (again), they get press, more people (not everyone uses Google) use their search, and that's where they make their money.
Google is a young, rich, sorry very rich company. They can experiment a lot. They're not just about search anymore, they are about data management and distributed computing. Huge datasets they time and again prove to manage effectively and reliably. Earth, images, movies - all huge datasets, that require specialised database infrastructure. I have more and more the feeling that they do all this partly for fun, partly because they can, and partly simply as experiment. Images are relative large sets of data, especially when you have millions of them, and they are in high resolutions, possibly stored even with limited compression to make the stitching together part easier.
I've been playing with Google Earth now and then, and I love the street view. It's truly impressive how one can turn around in the street, with the images following. Borderlines between images may be a bit patchy at time, but considering it is all done automatically it's quite impressive. There is a lot of processing power behind that (they probably borrow some of my computer as well, but still).
Google by now has probably the most computing power of any company in the world. I wouldn't be surprised if full percentages of the world's computing power are in hands of Google already. Most of all I hope they stay true to their "do no evil" mantra, as I'm sure there is a lot of good that can come out of these experiments.
technically speaking, the generated simulation could also be more accurate than the stitched pictures! :)
depends what you mean by accurate. I mean, pictures are a more accurate representation of what you SEE, but space is curved, and technically the models could be a better representation of the actual topography of space.
-b