Thursday, March 13, 2008

Google Sky Site Launched

Google Sky was already a feature of desktop app Google Earth. Now it’s moved to the browser at sky.google.com. The Google Lat Long blog and Google’s press release list the features of this new service:

• Zoom and pan the sky, like with Google Maps
• Link to any particular place
• A search box which expands results if something is found
• Different views to switch to, like infrared or microwave
• Best-of galleries with imagery from Hubble and other telescopes
• A podcasts gallery
• The ability to overlays KML (Keyhole Markup Language) files, similar to Google Maps and Google Earth

Google since some time also offers special maps sites for Moon and Mars.

In other news from last month, CNet reported that a former Google contractor, Jonathan Cobb, sues Google for allegedly stealing the idea for Google Sky from him. Jonathan claims that he shared the idea for something like Google Sky “in internal e-mail discussion groups when he worked at Google as a contractor beginning in 2006 ... The Google Earth Sky layer, when it launched in August 2007, was similar in interface and functionality to what he had conceptualized, Cobb claims.” (Then again, is it the idea of a sky view, or the actual implementation of this, which is interesting and valuable?)

[Thanks Kate and Niraj!]

Google Sky Site Launched by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (2+19)

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