Google Earth 4.2 - What's New?
Explore the Sky
Switch your view to see the sky above your Earth location, and explore far-away galaxies, nebulae, and more. Zoom in to see imagery from the Hubble Space Telescope, learn about the lifecycle of a star, or even view the constellations. After all, the Earth doesn't sit in a vacuum... that would be an awful waste of space. Learn more.
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Messages from NYTimes
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In Google Earth, a Service for Scanning the Heavens
By MIGUEL HELFT
Published: August 22, 2007
After turning millions of Internet users into virtual explorers of the world with Google Earth, the Internet search giant is now hoping to turn many of them into virtual stargazers.
Google is unveiling within Google Earth today a new service called Sky that will allow users to view the skies as seen from Earth. Like Google Earth, Sky will let users fly around and zoom in, exposing increasingly detailed imagery of some 100 million stars and 200 million galaxies.
"You will be able to browse into the sky like never before," said Carol Christian, an astronomer with the Space Telescope Science Institute, a nonprofit academic consortium that supports the Hubble Space Telescope.
While other programs allow users to explore the skies, they typically combine a mix of representations of stars and galaxies that are overlaid with photographs, Ms. Christian said. "These are really the images of the sky. Everything is real."
The Sky imagery was stitched together from more than one million photographs from scientific and academic sources, including the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, the Palomar Observatory at the California Institute of Technology and the NASA-financed Hubble.
Google said that it developed the project strictly because some of its engineers were interested in it, and that it had no plans to make money from it for now.
"It's merely about getting new kinds of information out there for the public," said Chikai Ohazama, a Google Earth project manager.
As with Google Earth, individual users and organizations will be able to overlay photographs, annotations and other kinds of data on top of Sky's basic images and make them available to others as layers -- called mash-ups.
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.
A "backyard astronomy" layer highlights stars, galaxies and nebulae that are visible to the naked eye, with binoculars or with small telescopes.
"I think it will certainly be a great educational venue," said S. George Djorgovski, a Caltech astronomy professor.
"As the Google Earth example has shown, people are extremely ingenious in coming up with mash-ups and inventing other uses for it."
Professor Djorgovski has developed a mash-up depicting events like cosmic explosions. "This was a simple way to convey there is a dynamic aspect to the universe," he said.
Microsoft has a research project called the World Wide Telescope that offers similar capabilities to Sky. The project was once headed by Jim Gray, the veteran Microsoft researcher who disappeared this year after a sailing trip off San Francisco Bay.
To get Sky, users will have to download the latest version of Google Earth.
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Messages from SDSS
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(August 29, 2007) - Walk out in your backyard, look up, and see the Sloan Digital Sky Survey.
Drawing on 20 terabytes of data gathered over the last eight years, two scientists with the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS-II) helped develop a tool that allows internet users to 'step into their virtual backyard' and view images of hundreds of millions of objects.
Named 'Sky,' this new feature of Google Earth provides access to
the astronomical images from SDSS-II through the same interface that
millions have used to view satellite images of the earth's surface.
The collaboration between SDSS-II and Google was initiated in 2005 by astronomers Andrew Connolly and Ryan Scranton, both then at the University of Pittsburgh. During a subsequent year spent at Google's Pittsburgh Engineering Center, Connolly and Scranton led the development of Sky.
"We had been looking at ways to allow easy browsing and visualization of SDSS images," explained Connolly. "When Google Earth came out, we realized it was the perfect interface because it is so intuitive and so powerful. We just had to turn it on its back, so it could look up instead of down."
Just as a Google Earth user can rotate the globe and zoom
down to an individual building or street, Scranton explained,
"Sky lets you start from a map of the constellations and zoom to the individual pixels of a galaxy image from Sloan or Hubble.
It really brings home just how big the Universe is."
The SDSS has imaged about one-quarter of the sky, using
a 120-megapixel digital camera on the 2.5-meter telescope
of Apache Point Observatory, in New Mexico.
To span the remainder, 'Sky' uses shallower images scanned from photographic plates, obtained by other telescopes.
'Sky' also incorporates images from Hubble Space Telescope,
which cover only a tiny fraction of the sky but provide
the spectacular image quality that can only be obtained
from space.
"If you live in the suburbs, you can go into your backyard and see a few hundred stars," said University of Washington astronomer
Simon Krughoff, another member of the Sky development team.
"Now you can go to your virtual backyard and see 100 million
stars and 100 million galaxies found by the SDSS."
The SDSS pioneered the use of enormous digital cameras to image large areas of sky at the terapixel resolution needed
to reveal the structure of distant galaxies and discover
quasars at the far edge of the universe. "We knew these data would be enormously valuable to professional
astronomers," said SDSS Project Scientist Jim Gunn, of Princeton
University. "But when we conceived the project in the early 1990s,
we had no idea how to make the full resolution pictures available to the world at large. It was just too much data."
"Over the years, we have put a lot of effort into making the SDSS data accessible to the general public and useful for students and teachers at all levels," noted Johns Hopkins University astronomer Alex Szalay, an architect of the SDSS-II database system and its SkyServer web interface
(http://cas.sdss.org/dr6/en). "Sky is a wonderful way to extend that access because it reaches so many people and makes it so easy to navigate the sky."
Connolly, Scranton, and Szalay have collaborated for many years on statistical analyses of the clustering of galaxies in the SDSS, which require painstaking attention to minute details of the data quality and calibration.
"Digging into the data has its satisfactions," observed Scranton, "especially because these analyses tell you about the history of galaxies and the contents of the Universe. But with Sky, it's great to just step back and look at it all."
ABOUT THE SLOAN DIGITAL SKY SURVEY (www.sdss.org)
The Sloan Digital Sky Survey is the most ambitious survey of the sky ever undertaken, involving more than 300 astronomers and engineers at 25 institutions around the world. SDSS-II, which runs from 2005-2008,
is comprised of three complementary projects. The Legacy Survey
is completing the original SDSS map of half the northern sky,
determining the positions, brightness, and colors of hundreds of millions of celestial objects and measuring distances to more than a million galaxies and quasars. SEGUE (Sloan Extension for Galactic Understanding and Exploration) is mapping the structure and stellar makeup of
the Milky Way Galaxy. The Supernova Survey repeatedly scans a stripe along the celestial equator to discover and measure supernovae
and other variable objects, probing the accelerating expansion of
the cosmos. All three surveys are carried out with special purpose
instruments on the 2.5-meter telescope at Apache Point Observatory,
in New Mexico.
Funding for the SDSS and SDSS-II has been provided by the Alfred P. Sloan
Foundation, the Participating Institutions, the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Energy, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the Japanese Monbukagakusho, the Max Planck Society and the Higher Education Funding Council for England.
The SDSS is managed by the Astrophysical Research Consortium for the
Participating Institutions. The Participating Institutions are the
American Museum of Natural History, Astrophysical Institute Potsdam,
University of Basel, University of Cambridge, Case Western Reserve
University, University of Chicago, Drexel University, Fermilab, the
Institute for Advanced Study, the Japan Participation Group, Johns Hopkins
University, the Joint Institute for Nuclear Astrophysics, the Kavli
Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology, the Korean Scientist
Group, the Chinese Academy of Sciences (LAMOST), Los Alamos National
Laboratory, the Max-Planck-Institute for Astronomy (MPIA), the
Max-Planck-Institute for Astrophysics (MPA), New Mexico State University,
Ohio State University, University of Pittsburgh, University of Portsmouth,
Princeton University, the United States Naval Observatory and the University of Washington.
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Messages from IVOA VOEvent
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Today Google has released a new Sky layer for Google Earth [1]. In conjunction, the VOEventNet project [2] is pleased to announce a set of mashups showing recent astronomical transients, updated every 15 minutes. The mashups show GCN feeds (SWIFT, Milagro, Integral), the GRBlog (contains sky-located GCN circulars), as well as OGLE microlensing events. The event feeds contain VOEvents, and drilldown is available to finding charts, light curves, and original VOEvents. Once the new Google Earth is installed, click on the mashup links [3], [4], [5] to automatically show the content.
[1] To use Sky, you will need to update your Google Earth client application to the latest (4.2) version at http://earth.google.com. Click the black and yellow icon at the top center to switch to Sky.
[2] http://voeventnet.caltech.edu
[3] http://voeventnet.caltech.edu/google/GCN.kmz
[4] http://voeventnet.caltech.edu/google/GRBlog.kmz
[5] http://voeventnet.caltech.edu/google/OGLE.kmz |
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变色卡
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显身卡
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哉