Google, having brought the earth into the living room, has turned its eye to the heavens to bring the sky at night indoors.
More than 250 million people have used Google Earth’s satellite pictures to look at their own homes from space or into their neighbours’ back gardens or viewed weird and wonderful geological features.
The internet facility has now been expanded to offer a glimpse of 100 million individual stars and 200 million galaxies as part of the Google Sky initiative.
The system has been designed to show the night sky from any point in the world and to explain what it is the user would see were they to peer up at the stars on a clear night.
Information on 20,000 celestial bodies, including stars, planets, galaxies, constellations and comets are available at the click of a mouse.
Just as Google Earth showed the planet in close up by providing access to satellite pictures, Google Sky offers photographs from a range of observatories, including the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope.
Thousands of images have been put together to provide a comprehensive view of the night sky with the ability to zoom in on cosmic features of interest.
The pictures were already available to the public through the internet but the Google site is designed to bring them together in an organised, easy-to-access manner.
The facility was created in partnership with a range of organisations including Nasa, the United Kingdom Astronomy Technology Centre and the Anglo-Australian Observatory.
Among the cosmic subjects with dedicated areas on the website are the constellations, photographs from Hubble, the moon and the planets.
Users can also take virtual tours through galaxies such as the Ursa Minor Dwarf and the Milky Way, and watch the life of a star from formation to supernova and beyond.
Information and pictures provided by Google Sky have been verified by professional astronomers but additional details can be added to the site in ‘layers’.
In one layer a professional astronomer has included details of dozens of solar systems which are known to have planets.
Enthusiasts can add their own information, whether to note the discovery of an exploding star or simply to offer a photograph of the sky from their own back garden, in associated layers. Some, after being checked for accuracy and suitability, will eventually be incorporated within the main site.
Dr Fransisco Diego, an astronomer at University College London, said at the launch at Google’s officies in London that the internet facility will be an aid to professionals and amateurs alike. He described it as “an amazing facility” and said: “It opens a window on to space for the general public that will let them explore the sky.”
Dr Carol Christian, of the Space Telescope Science Institute in the United States, was part of the team that created the site that she said would allow everyone to see “the wonders of our universe”.
She added: “Never before has a roadmap of the entire sky been made so readily available. Sky in Google Earth will foster and initiate new understanding of the universe by bringing it to everyone’s home computer.”
Jason Chuck, of Google, said the aim had been to create a system that offered an introduction to astronomy rather than a comprehensive database. He hope it would serve as a teaching aid as well as being a site to be browsed purely out of interest.
It also, he said, surmounted the problem of trying to stargaze during cloudy weather, especially during the current damp spell, and in cities where light pollution hides many stars.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/science/article2308536.ece
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