'Scuse me while Google kisses the sky (and dryer or BACN?)

Shamelessly morphing the memes, it's Thursday's IT Blogwatch: in which Google Earth looks upwards and maps the sky. Not to mention the Bacon Access Control Node...

Jeremy "T." Kirk boldly looks where no man has looked before : [you're fired -Ed.]

Google Inc. may just be the center of the universe now. A new add-on for its Earth satellite program, called Sky, lets users explore space and see photos of the precise star formation overhead based on their locale. People can now use Google to peruse astrological wonders such as the Crab Nebula, an expanding remnant of a supernova 6,300 light-years from earth. Markers within the star photos pull in explanatory text from online encyclopedia Wikipedia. Overlays outline constellations such as Leo, illustrate phases of the moon and show how the planets visible from Earth orbit over two months.

Google Sky uses high-resolution imagery from the Space Telescope Science Institute, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, the Digital Sky Survey Consortium, CalTech's Palomar Observatory, the U.K.'s Astronomy Technology Centre, the Anglo-Australian Observatory, as well as NASA's Hubble Space Telescope ... covering 100 million stars and 200 million galaxies.
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While Google Earth is free for regular users, it also offers a commercial version, Earth Enterprise, that lets businesses attach their own data to satellite imagery and host the information on their own server. Microsoft Corp. sells an enterprise version of its Virtual Earth platform, a mapping and imagery service that corporations can tie into their own applications. Various companies offer star-charting and astronomy "planetarium" packages, among them the Starry Night series from Imaginova Corp. [more]

Todd Haselton adds:

Like Google Earth, navigation is easy. All you need to do is type in the name of the galaxy or star you'd like to visit, and Sky takes you there; it's kind of like traveling at faster than light speed without that pesky relativity.
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The backyard astronomy layer ... is great for those that like to sit out on their porch at night and look at the stars with the naked eye or with small telescopes; it gives information like locations and names of stars we can all see without expensive telescopes. [more]

Angela Gunn gets motivated:

[I'm] not at all surprised that everyone's favorite planet-browsing program has branched out into the heavens -- I wondered about that every time the program started on that wide-angle starfield, actually.
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I am incredibly pleased with the possibility for incorporating star maps into... oh, everything. That post about Mars and Aldebaran yesterday, for instance. Google Sky has not only a great zoom into Aldebaran, as you see above, but a nice linked piece on the life of your average red giant. Suddenly I have several orders of magnitude more motivation than I did yesterday to finally start building you nice people some pretty map-based tours -- or at least to link you up to Google's latest addictive toy. [more]

Stefan Geens makes the obvious 2001 reference:

As Dave Bowman would say it, "My God, it's full of stars!"
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If anyone wonders why Google might want to do this: I think the answer lies in the new search pane ... Google's mission is no longer to organize the world's information, but the universe's. Vint Cerf's talk at GeoWeb a few weeks ago now takes on a whole new salience. (He cautioned against developing a too Earth-centric internet.) [more]

Alberto Conti remembers when he first saw Google Earth:

I immediately wrote to Carol Christian, my collaborator at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) ... I was simply excited at just the possibility that we could put Hubble and other astronomical images on a GoogleSky client!!! This is really when it all stated. Carol and I have been the force behind GoogleSky at STScI ever since!
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A few days later, I attended a National Virtual Observatory meeting together with Carol Christian. At the meeting we showed a [Keyhole Markup Language file] that had been originally developed by STScI's Frank Summers. Frank had taken the Hubble Press Releases and used the KML GroundOverlay structure to display them in Google Earth. It was the beginning of the realization that KML was versatile and that the Google GUI was malleable enough to be adapted to sky data!

Carol coming from her State Department and Educational background, saw immediately the potential for such an interface as a true revolutionary medium for communicating the beauty of astronomy! I saw this also as a potential vehicle to perhaps enable new science.

At the meeting we met three people that were going to be the Google team that really made it all happen: Andrew Connolly, Ryan Scranton and Simon Krughoff. All three of them are astronomers, but they soon would become interns at Google and start working on GoogleSky. [more]

But Phil Plait pooh-poohs the program:

I don’t like it ... I think this version is lacking some basic necessities ... It doesn’t tell me what time of day it’s using — the sky moves, so time is crucial. It doesn’t move the sky in real time (or provide that option). It doesn’t tell me if the Sun is up or not. It doesn’t tell me where the horizon is ... When I click on, for example, the Owl Nebula (a classic planetary nebula in Ursa Major) it displays an almost illegible image of the object. The description is fine, but the icon says it’s a globular cluster! Oops.
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I’m scratching my head over why they left out so many obvious and necessary features in the first release. I think Google Sky can be a great tool, I really do, but to be a useful planetarium app it needs work ... It’s more of a gee-whiz photo album than a real piece of interactive software. IMO most folks will play with it for a few minutes and then stop using it, since at the moment it isn’t much more than a clickable way to look at objects on the sky. Once real interactivity is built into it — a way to see what’s up now, or tomorrow night, or on my trip to Alaska at 2:00 a.m. — it will begin to realize its potential. [more]

Gary Price offers alternatives:

One of the most exciting things about the web is that you often run into several tools that each appear to do the same thing but — when you dig deeper — do not. Choice is a good thing and the web often delivers ... What can be difficult — actually a challenge — are the constantly growing number of tools and features that often receive little or no attention from the masses, sometimes including info pros.
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There is not a single mention (seems strange) of another project — NASA World Wind, developed by both NASA employees and volunteers. It has been online and growing for several years, about the same time Google Earth started to take off ... Check out all of the available add-ons. For example, [one] shows the Apollo landing sites on the Moon. Numerous data sets of Earth are also part of World Wind, and an another add-on allows users to see Virtual Earth imagery from MSFT. You could easily write a book about all that World Wind provides. It’s sad that more people don’t know about it. Perhaps in some (maybe not all) situations, Service B might be better than Service A, the one that is already well known.
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Another Source for the Data Google is Introducing today is: Sky-Map.org. Access is free and is entirely web-based ... The API for SKY-MAP is also available. [more]

Oh, and hasn't Google's Lior Ron heard of the southern hemisphere?:

Since people across the world all share the same sky, we're happy to announce we'll be making Sky available in 13 languages. [more]

Buffer overflow:

Around the Net

• blog*on*nymity: Blogging While Female, Online Inequality and the Law
• Nicholas Carr: My, what a friendly ad
• Boing Boing: Bacn spreads around the globe
• Layer 8: Open source and server virtualization lead state data center consolidation moves
• Paul Krill: Sun eyes GPL for NetBeans
• Realtime Messaging and Web Security: Mobile Users to IT: Security is Your Job Not Mine
• Sciencebase: Why Do We Yawn?

Around Computerworld

• Mitch Betts: My five favorite Horizon Award winners
• Ken Gagne: Red vs. Blue brought machinima to the masses
• Mitch Betts: Memo to CIOs: Design for people, build for change
• Martin MC Brown: Sun's 8-core T2 CPU trounced with a 64-core CPU
• Shark Tank: Another satisfied customer
• Michael R. Farnum: Hurricane Dean websites popping up - beware of fraud
• Douglas Schweitzer: Adding gadgetry to your Vista
• Shark Bait: High School Teachers

Previously in IT Blogwatch

• MTV <3 RealNetworks (and UFO ride)
• What's Skype's excuse for huge outage? (and sarcastic Wednesday)
• Wikipedia wobbles as PR runs amok (and Alien salad)
• Skype gives us the silent treatment (and weird converter)
• Now it's Xen's turn in the virtualization spotlight (and Kenny+KT)
• Older posts

And finally... BACN: Bacon Access Control Node?

Richi Jennings is an independent analyst/adviser/consultant, specializing in blogging, email, and spam. A 20 year, cross-functional IT veteran, he is also an analyst at Ferris Research. You too can pretend to be Richi's friend on Facebook, or just use boring old email: blogwatch@richi.co.uk.