Flying around space and zooming in on over 100 million stars and 200 million galaxies is now possible thanks to Google. Their latest version of Google Earth (version 4.2) includes “Sky for Google Earth” which will allow users to “Explore the universe from the comfort of your chair,” as Google says.
I was pretty amazed when Google Earth originally came out, and now I simply can’t believe they’re taking us to the skies. The images that you’ll see in Sky are absolutely real. The New York Times reports that the images were stitched together from over one million photos from different scientific and academic sources like the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and the Hubble Telescope.
While Google Earth is amazing, I’ve often wondered why Google has put so much time and effort into developing it when they’re really not making money from it. And now that they added Sky, it made me wonder even more. As it turns out, this project was done simply because some of their engineers were interested in it – they have no plans to make money from it.
Once you download Google Earth 4.2, just click the “sky button” or go to the “View” menu and click “Switch to sky.” From there, the Sky is all yours to explore via zooming, rotating, and panning. You can also use your scroll wheel on your mouse and your keyboard to navigate, as you were able to do previously with Google Earth. Below is a video from Google that explains further how to use Sky for Google Earth.
Thanks Google! There will be thousands who enjoy this…
Download Google Earth Version 4.2
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Tags: Google, Google Earth
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They should add Google Sun, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Moon in the future. That way users could explore the whole solar system from the comfort of their homes!
I was just playing around with it and trying to figure out how to view the sky as seen outside my home (I can’t figure it out right now). As I zoomed out from Earth, I noticed that “My Places” that I have bookmarked in my home city show up somewhere in the middle of the galaxy. And yet they’re a surprisingly short drive - no space shuttle required! LOL So looks like Google has a few bugs to work out. But I do think it’s awesome that they’ve done this.
Very nice kinda reminds me of Celestia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celestia).
There is another program like this made by NASA. Its called WorldWind. Check it out. It has all the planents, and has had space for a long time.
It makes you wonder how many years it will be before we don’t even have to step outside of our house.
I had never heard of that one before. I’ll be giving it a try shortly.
I’ve used WorldWind for quite some time, and Google isn’t nearly as good as it yet. Of course I wouldn’t expect anyone to be able to do it better than NASA.