Google Sky Launches – Useful? Maybe. Sweet? Definitely.

“Many Times, We Will Just Have To Let Go.”

Traveling to the stars has never been easier with Google Sky.

To help you explore the far reaches of our universe, Google has teamed up with astronomers at some of the largest observatories in the world to bring you a new view of the sky. Using Google Maps this tool provides an exciting way to browse and explore the universe. You can find the positions of the planets and constellations on the sky and even watching the birth of distant galaxies as seen by the Hubble Space Telescope.

We are particularly excited about the ability to view the universe at different wavelengths, to see how it would look if our eyes worked in the x-rays or infrared. As you explore these new layers, play with the transparency to blend between the different wavelengths and see how different parts of the universe light up at different wavelengths

If you are interested in what’s happening on the sky tonight or over the next few months then check out the podcasts from Earth and Sky or search for the position of your favorite planet.

Google Sky includes a number of different ways to explore the universe. The initial view shows the visible universe and is a mosaic of images from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, the Digitized Sky Survey and the Hubble Space Telescope. Select the thumbnail images at the bottom of the display to bring up the planets, the constellations, highlights from the Hubble Space Telescope, famous stars, galaxies and nebulae, views of the universe in the x-ray, ultraviolet and infrared and podcasts about upcoming astronomical events from Earth and Sky Podcasts. Other items available through Google Sky:

• Infrared – An infrared view of the sky from the Infrared Astronomical Satellite (IRAS). Change the transparency of this layer by moving the slide bar to blend the optical and infrared.
• Microwave – A view of the microwave sky from NASA’s Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP), which shows the universe as it was 380,000 years after the big bang.
• Historical – The sky as drawn by Giovanni Maria Cassini (printed in 1792) showing the constellations in their classical form from the collections of David Rumsey.

The imagery for Google Sky comes from some of the largest ground- and space-based astronomical surveys.

The visible data comes from a combination of surveys: the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, the Digital Sky Survey Consortium which you can find more about at: http://www.stsci.edu, http://www.caltech.edu, http://www.roe.ac.uk, and http://www.aao.gov.au; NASA and ESA’s Hubble Space Telescope about which you can find more at the Space Telescope Science Institute and the ESA Hubble Space Telescope home page. More details about these observatories can be found on our partners page.

Additional layers for Sky came from a number of space orbiting observatories: the x-ray data from NASA’s Chandra satellite, the ultraviolet images from NASA’s GALEX satellite, the infrared images from the joint NASA, Netherlands and UK Infrared Astronomical Satellite (IRAS) and the microwave sky from NASA’s Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) satellite.

The historical constellations layer are created from the historical maps available at the David Rumsey Historical Maps Collection.