Google the visible universe with Sky: starting August 22

William Atkins
Wednesday, 22 August 2007 19:39

Science - Space

Google is introducing Sky, a virtual telescope, within Google Earth on August 22, 2007.

Sky allows users to explore the part of the universe that has been imaged by astronomers—which includes real images of approximately 100 million individual stars and 200 million galaxies.

(The entire universe is thought to contain at least 125 billion galaxies [that’s 125,000 million galaxies], with each galaxy containing, very roughly, hundreds of billions of stars.)

Space Telescope Science Institute astronomer Carol Christian says about Sky: “You will be able to browse the sky like never before.” She adds, “These are really the images of the sky, Everything is real.”

The Sky is accessible through Google Earth (http://earth.google.com/) by clicking on “Switch to Sky” from the “view” drop-down menu. (You’ll need to download the newest software if you have not already done so.)

To learn more about Sky, view a demonstration at http://earth.google.com/sky/skyedu or watch former NASA astronaut Dr. Sally Ride and Google engineer Greg Coombe talk about some of Sky's capabilities at http://earth.google.com/sky.
Sky provides seven layers:

• Constellations;
• Backyard Astronomy (various celestial objects viewable with the naked eye, binoculars, and small telescopes);
• Hubble Space Telescope Imagery;
• Moon;
• Planets;
• User Guide to Galaxies; and
• Life of a Star.

The Sky program was created by the Google engineering team in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. They used imagery, over one million photographs, from several scientific groups including the Space Telescope Science Institute (NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope) the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, the Digital Sky Survey Consortium, California Institute of Technology’s Palomar Observatory, the United Kingdom Astronomy Technology Centre, and the Angle-Australian Observatory.