Playing With Google Sky
Google have updated their Google Earth application to now include images from the night sky. Now you can whizz around space from the comfort of your computer chair.
At first I thought "How boring. It's going to be a lot of black with millions of tiny white specs". Well, I was wrong. I updated my Google Earth last night and took it for a spin to see what it's all about.
First thing I noticed, when fully zoomed out, it looks like the inside of a planetarium...
It's not really that surprising considering it's made up millions of "photos" of the sky, all carefully pieced together (someone has a lot of patience).
Not put off by the planetarium look, I started to delve around. The first thing I spotted was what appears to be a jolly great big rock...
Interesting. But on closer inspection, it's actually a bit of yellowy cloudy stuff. A bit more whizzing around and I soon found some pretty cool looking views that you normally only see in text books or encyclopaedias, like this one...
There are a lot of these cool bright blue dots. There are also some yellow and red ones too. I can only assume these are stars or something.
I then felt creative and thought I'd see if I could find a well known constellation or two. Taadaaa!!! Andromeda...
... and Orion Nebula ...
Cool huh? These must be the pics that appear in encyclopaedias.
I also happened to stumble upon a satellite in the process of evaporating or teleporting (how else do you explain it's translucency?)...
Then the childish side of me kicked in. I found Uranus too...
Hee hee hee. Google Earth is actually quite clever here. Whilst it doesn't show you the actual image of the planets, it does calculate their current location in relation to the data it has, and the time of day.
Just as well I took this for a spin. For something I thought would be really boring, it certainly turned out to be quite a bit of fun.
If you've got a super fast broadband connection, loads of free bandwidth, and a ton of time, download Google Earth and have fun whizzing all over the world, and the night skies from the comfort of your computer chair.