Reach for the stars

Posted on 7 Dec 2007 at 11:25

These criticisms are undeniable, but Google Sky was only introduced in the summer and, if the progress of Earth is anything to by, will doubtless improve in future releases. And that's not to say Google Sky doesn't already have much to admire. First, it is a great, accessible way for newcomers to explore the stars and put astronomical news or Hubble imagery in context. More importantly, it provides a framework from which amateur and professional astronomers can share information or discoveries. Professor Francisco Diego, president of the UK Association for Astronomy Education, has described it as "a kind of astronomical YouTube", adding that it gives amateur astronomers "a fantastic opportunity to display their own work. They discover a lot of supernovae."

It's all down to the magic of KML. Using Google Earth, you can annotate the sky with placemarks or overlay your own photos on a new Google sky layer, save or email your efforts and even share them over a network just as you can any other KML file. You can keep track of your own observations with placemarks and telescope-assisted digital photographs and - if you're comfortable with KML coding - produce time-based animations or more sophisticated rich-text presentations. The trickiest bit is converting celestial co-ordinates to the conventional earthly co-ordinates used by the Google Earth app, but even here help is available (see www.pcpro.co.uk/links/159ge2 for details).
The slider in the top-right corner enables you to view the movement of the planets across the sky over several months.
People are already doing exciting things with Sky. The astronomers at CalTech, for example, have produced a network link that publishes news of astronomical transients (say, a Gamma Ray burst) to a Google Sky layer, updated every 15 minutes. Other KML layers offer real-time planet movement, more detailed planet surfaces or imagery captured by NASA's Chandra X-Ray observatory. And this, remember, is only the beginning.