A Mars Odyssey

“This is a fun program for amateur astronomers, scientists, educators, and the public to explore space,” said Carol Christian, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute and one of the developers of the Sky in Google Earth project. “It is like having the heavens at your fingertips, or your own planetarium.”

Recently developed is a partnership between the popular search engine Google and the Baltimore Space Telescope Science Institute, a Hubble science operations center. Offering to the public for free a way to cruise the heavens, a simple download of the Google program allows every computer to become a tool for viewing spectacular space images from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. Called “Sky” in Google Earth, Hubble images such as the Eagle Nebula or colliding galaxies are all selected from a menu.

With a wide assortment of celestial objects available, every person can now begin a tour by choosing “Switch to Sky” from a simple and easy to run menu in Google Earth. The menu offers choices of images or locations, such as viewing the constellations which surrounds a chosen object. The viewer can zoom in to focus on an object or image, or zoom out to see the sky with it.

The program is designed with a background of actual stars and galaxies that have been taken by the Digitized Sky Survey and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, two powerful surveys of the heavens. The Digitized Sky Survey involves surveys of the entire sky with a million objects to choose from, while the Sloan Survey offers hundreds of millions of fainter objects that covers about a quarter of the sky.

On a serious note, the HubbleSite logo icon offers information of the chosen object that has been taken from the Institute press release or the photo caption appears. The Google Earth software, Sky, provides links to Hubble news database, along with other important Hubble information—including the Hubble Heritage project. There are about 125 Hubble images in Sky, involving the life of the telescope which have been meticulously prepared for the public, in collaboration with the Institute’s science visualization experts at its Office of Public Outreach and the many worldwide astronomers who use the Hubble.

In the making is a possibility that other observatories will add images to Google Earth’s Sky for public viewing, such as the National Optical Astronomy Observatory and other NASA missions.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 22nd, 2007 at 8:04 am and is filed under Public Relations, Space Agency News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.