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. "

Comments

sounds...

[cosmocain]

...a bit like this? except for open source. hu. now, what should motivate me using the google-tool?

Re:sounds...

[morgan_greywolf]

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.

Re:sounds...

[Anne_Nonymous]

Google allows you to overlay a map of the nearest Starbucks on the night sky.

Re:sounds...

[ajs]

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. I think you phrased that poorly. Stellarium lets you see the sky from any point on earth, but you might find yourself using Google Maps (and/or Google Earth) to locate your point on earth. This is a fair point, but one that's moot after the first time you fire up Stellarium.

Another tool that's useful is celestia, a tool for displaying the known universe in 3D, and navigating through it. It's a nice compliment to stellarium, and I recommend both tools highly. To see what celestia is capable of, fire it up and press "d" for the demo. It's definitely one of those "oooh, ahhh" moments.

Re:sounds...

[bcrowell]

Some free-as-in-something possibilities that either run on linux or are web-based:

• YourSky - This is a very elaborate and sophisticated web-based service that makes star charts; free as in beer, but not open-source
• PlanetFinder - A java applet I wrote that concentrates on ease of use; good for figuring out what you're seeing with your naked eyes, or for planning observations, e.g., when is Mars going to rise so I can point my telescope at it?
• Stellarium - cool photorealistic planetarium (computer-generated images, as opposed to maps or photos); FOSS
• Celestia - lets you fly around the universe in 3d; FOSS
• Xephem - Sky maps. Free as in beer. Has some really nasty licensing issues. I used to use it a lot, and it worked great, but it's no longer available as a Debian package.

Note that they all do different things. They're not interchangeable.

Another suggestion

[Sierpinski]

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.

Re:Another suggestion

[Deag]

This website is good for this. I used it for looking at the ISS and it was accurate.

Re:Another suggestion

[CraftyJack]

You're thinking of JTrack:
science.nasa.gov/realtime/jtrack/3d/JTrack3D.html

Re:Another suggestion

[Sierpinski]

You're thinking of JTrack:
science.nasa.gov/realtime/jtrack/3d/JTrack3D.html

That is the one! Thanks for the link. I did a very feeble search earlier and couldn't find it.

Re:Another suggestion

[alphakappa]

There is a layer that can provide satellite orbits

http://www.gearthblog.com/blog/archives/2006/12/in teresting_satellit.html

Re:yes, but

[Matisaro]

No, why would someone who runs linux want to know what the outside looks like?

So what's the next step?

[BlackCobra43]

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...

Re:So what's the next step?

[Anonymous Coward]

As if the internet didn't provide enough porn already.

Re:So what's the next step?

[StikyPad]

Clearly the next steps are Google Fire and Google Water.

Stellarium is generated.

[Whiney Mac Fanboy]

According to these guys, google sky is (like google earth) stitched together actual photographs.

Could be more accurate than a generated model.

Kids these days

[Chapter80]

No need to go outside anymore!

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?"

If it's been released, where's the link

[ahecht]

The article doesn't have a download link, and a Google search turns up nothing. Where's the link?

Re:If it's been released, where's the link

[zetes]

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

Re:If it's been released, where's the link

[chr.vinter]

Update or install Google Earth from http://http//earth.google.com/download-earth.html

Re:If it's been released, where's the link

[lexbaby]

Google demo and info here: http://earth.google.com/sky/skyedu.html

You hear it here first

[12357bd]

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...

But, still no roads in Mexico on maps.google?

[sillyphisher1]

Google can map 200 million galaxies in 3-D but can't come up with a road map of Mexico? What's up?

Re:But, still no roads in Mexico on maps.google?

[Anonymous Coward]

First mexico needs to build this thing called "roads."

Re:But, still no roads in Mexico on maps.google?

[mce]

Didn't you know that eternal history of both earth and the universe revolves around the US? After all, have serious aliens ever landed outside the US? Whenever they threatened the world, haven't they destroyed New-York or Washington in particular? The Martians don't care about Mexico. Ask Hollywood, those people can know first hand.

Re:But, still no roads in Mexico on maps.google?

[Kenji DRE]

Yes, i can confirm this. Aliens always aim for the Statue of Liberty in New York first.

Re:Let's hope...

[D-Cypell]

...or google images is to perverts.

(c) google

[Speare]

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.

Re:(c) google

[wvmarle]

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.

Millennium Falcon

[dogmatixpsych]

If Han Solo had only had this software he could have mapped out the best route and made the Kessel Run in 9 parsecs.

Re:yes, but

[Opportunist]

How could he look outside, without Windows?

Sky in Google Earth is 99.9999% accurate

[GamEmpire]

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.

Check out Celestia

[voislav98]

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.

Re:yes, but

[jollyreaper]

> 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.

Accurate Simulation?

[Flwyd]

Can I turn on the light pollution layer so I get a true sense of the Los Angeles sky?