Google Earth’s Sky

August 22, 2007 | Matt Marshall | Comments | |

googleearth-sky.bmpGoogle releases a new product within Google Earth today called Sky that will allow users to view the skies, along with stars, as seen from Earth.

There’s a demo here.

The New York Times has a review here.

Sky will let users fly around and zoom in, exposing increasingly detailed imagery of some 100 million stars and 200 million galaxies…Sky already has layers showing various constellations, a user’s guide to galaxies, the position of planets two months into the future and animations of lunar positions.

Microsoft has a research project that offers something similar, called World Wide Telescope (more here). Jim Gray, the Microsoft researcher who once led the project, disappeared earlier this year after a sailing trip off San Francisco Bay.

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Matt Marshall is editor and CEO of VentureBeat. Follow him on Twitter at @mmarshall, and follow VentureBeat on Twitter at @venturebeat.

  • I am a director of SKY-MAP.ORG group. Our interactive web-based application demonstrates > 600.000.000 objects in Google-like style. We also have SDSS, IRAS, and H-Alpha surveys integrated. SKY-MAP.ORG is actually much more advenced and accurate we have >10.000 objects mapped only on HDF (http://www.sky-map.org/?img_source=IMG_all&...). And we would be happy to cooperate with Google.

    Thanks,
    K. Lysenko,
    SKY-MAP.ORG,
    416-8369785
  • Did that guy die or the sentence meant that he sailed off to Google :-) ?