DigitMemo.com

Google may just be the center of the universe now. A new add-on for its Earth satellite program, called Sky, lets users explore space and see photos of the precise star formation overhead based on their locale.

People can now use Google to peruse astrological wonders such as the Crab Nebula, an expanding remnant of a supernova 6,300 light-years from earth. Markers within the star photos pull in explanatory text from online encyclopedia Wikipedia. Overlays outline constellations such as Leo, illustrate phases of the moon and show how the planets visible from Earth orbit over two months.

Google Sky uses high-resolution imagery from the Space Telescope Science Institute, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, the Digital Sky Survey Consortium, CalTech’s Palomar Observatory, the U.K.’s Astronomy Technology Centre, the Anglo-Australian Observatory, as well as NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope.

The imagery covers 100 million stars and 200 million galaxies, Google said.

While much space imagery is already available online, Google’s goal was to make it more accessible by wrapping it into its Earth program, which previously focused on satellite images of earth. The project came out of Google’s engineering team in Pittsburgh.

“Zoom into distant galaxies hundreds of millions of light-years away, explore the constellations, see the planets in motion, witness a supernova explosion; it’s like having a giant, virtual telescope at your command — your own personal planetarium,” wrote Google product manager Lior Ron on the Google Earth and Maps team blog.

Using the service requires a new download of Google Earth.

While Google Earth is free for regular users, it also offers a commercial version, Earth Enterprise, that lets businesses attach their own data to satellite imagery and host the information on their own server.

Microsoft Corp. sells an enterprise version of its Virtual Earth platform, a mapping and imagery service that corporations can tie into their own applications.

Various companies offer star-charting and astronomy “planetarium” packages, among them the Starry Night series from Imaginova Corp.

Source: ComputerWorld