Oh…Look At The Stars…!
I guess I can blab about this now…since it’s been made public… Perhaps you’ve heard of Google Earth. Have you ever wondered what Google Sky might look like?
Wonder no more…
Sky at Google Earth, which made its debut in cyberspace early yesterday, turns Googlers around and aims their eyes toward the heavens, with user-friendly tools for navigating and zooming deep into the skies of both the Northern and Southern hemispheres.
In the background there are 100 million individual stars and 200 million galaxies. They’re not randomly generated dots, but real, digitized photos — a million of them — stitched seamlessly together from some of the world’s most complete sky surveys.
Astronomers at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore have added 127 high-resolution digital photographs from the Hubble Space Telescope. They’ve spent months patching them all into Google’s sky at their proper zoomable distances and precisely in position.
"It’s a very interesting tool to allow people, as never before, to browse the sky," said Alberto Conti, an institute astronomer and development manager for the institute’s Community Missions Office, which works to make Hubble’s discoveries accessible to the public.
Because of light pollution, he said, lots of people, especially in East Coast cities like Baltimore and New York, "have never really seen the sky." With Google Sky’s software, they can "explore things they could never see with their own eyes, or things they probably would not see in a planetarium."
More overlays, or "mashups," available to Sky users can reveal the constellations, and identify stars and planets visible from their backyards. Sky can also forecast the positions of the moon and planets two months in advance.
"I’m looking forward to people adding asteroids, and things that are moving — a lot of comets, you name it," Conti said. Just like Google Earth itself, Sky will allow users to form communities of common interest, and add their own images and lists of interesting sights.
This has been in the works for a while and it’s wonderful, the potential even more vast then with Google Earth. Imagine being able to view any part of the sky above, as only the most powerful telescopes humankind ever possessed can. Imagine zooming into a section of sky and viewing it in different wavelengths of light, or watching stellar events unfold over a time selectable period. Watch the light echo from V838 Monocerotis expand into the distant shells of its own cast-off matter. View the galaxies in various wavelengths, to pinpoint the regions of active star birth. Wander among distant galaxies near the dawn of time.
Now you can.
Some part of our being knows this is where we came from. We long to return.
And we can, because the Cosmos is also within us. We’re made of star stuff.
-Carl Sagan
