Wednesday, August 22, 2007

Google Sky Released

Google Earth (version 4.2) now comes with sky imagery, or a “virtual telescope,” as Google calls it. Google explains you can now explore star constellations, see planets in motion, or look at supernova explosions. The New York Times reports that these images were “stitched together from more than one million photographs from scientific and academic sources, including the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, the Palomar Observatory at the California Institute of Technology and the NASA-financed Hubble.” To see this in Google Earth, select View -> Switch to Sky from the menu.

Google already has imagery of earth, moon and Mars available as online services. Wonder if the sky pictures will make it to the web as well?

Another new feature in Google Earth is the addition of super-high resolution photo content, which you can see by adding the layer Primary Database -> Featured Content -> Gigapxl Photos. Unlike Google Street View, these photos however are only available for a few select places (like buildings), so there’s not a lot of random fun stuff to be found.

[Thanks Kevin, TomHTML, Manoj and Search-Engines-Web!]

Google Sky Released by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (5+10)

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