Google Earth…Your own personal planetarium!!
Now Google Earth is taking you into the stars, now stargaze from your computer, zoom through space, explore stars and look at planets. Just select “Switch to Sky” from the “view” menu in Google Earth and begin the tour. You can explore distant galaxies which are hundreds of million light years away from our planet, watch planets in motion or witness explosion of a supernova. In short, now Google Earth is your own personal giant telescope.
This new application named “Sky” is available in the new beta-version of Google Earth. Just like Google. To watch “Sky” you have to download new version of Google Earth from Google Earth home. You require Microsoft Windows, Linux or Apple Inc.’s Mac OS X operating system. Earth it has photographs tiled together giving deep picture of a sky. “Sky” is available in 13 languages.
Experts from Google have tiled terabytes of images so as to hold text of around 1 million books. This “Sky” was developed by engineers of Google’s Pittsburgh engineering office with help of Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI), United Kingdom Astronomy Technology Center (UK ATC), and Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), Digital Sky Survey Consortium (DSSC), Anglo Australian Observatory (AAO) and CalTech’s Palomar observatory. Also pictures taken by telescope at Coonabarabran’s Siding Spring Observatory are used in Google Earth Sky. Also astronomy professor Prof. Andrew Connolly from new University of Washington helped Google in development of this new product. He was working as visiting faculty at Google for a year. Also UW astronomy researcher Simon Krughoff participated in this “Sky” project.
Viewer can select categories like colliding galaxies or individual objects such as Eagle nebula. Same as that of geographical browsing “Sky” is also fully searchable just type in the part of sky you want to search for example if you want to explore any galaxy just type the name and “Sky” will take you to the tour of that galaxy.
However there are many programs available on internet which gives lot of information about universe but “Sky” blends this information and pictures together also one can see planets in motion.
Google Earth Gallery is also updated now it has number of astronomical images of our solar system, exoplanets. Data layers from “Sky” highlights moon, life of stars and the planets.
There in all seven layer added like; Constellations- This layer connects labeled points of constellations. You can learn more about stars that makes your favorite constellations. Backyard Astronomy - Amateur astronomer can get lot of information about stars, planets, nebula and galaxies which are visible to eye or binoculars in very organized way. Hubble Space Telescope Imagery - Viewers can watch night sky, explore 125 most popular Hubble images. Hubble images are real images of stars and galaxies these images are taken by two powerful surveys Digital sky survey and Sloan digital sky survey. Moon – this layer has animations of lunar positions and moon phase. Planets – this layer has information about seven planets along with their imagery also their position in sky of next two months. User guide to Galaxies – User can tour to through galaxies and last one is Life of Star – One can get information about different stages of stars from its life cycle.
“Sky” in Google Earth will bring new understanding of universe amongst the users. Google, Google Earth, Google Earth Features,
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