Google ain’t just takin’ over the planet–it’s a-takin’ over the universe. The company created a big splash a couple a weeks ago by adding stars ‘n’ planets to Google Earth. They called it Sky. So now ya’ll can look down on Google Earth and up at Google Sky.
This week, the company outlines its vision for the future of astronomy and Google Sky in a paper on the arXiv and ah don’t mind tellin ya’ll it’s ambitious. Google wants astrobods to use Sky for a-storin and a-sharin their data. Here’s what Ryan “Bantam” Scranton at Google’s gotta say:
Astronomical data is deceptively complex. At
first glance, it is merely the result of pointing a
telescope at the sky and recording what you see.
In reality, however, a scientifically useful description
of a single observation requires knowledge of
when it was taken, from where, over what wavelengths,
in what conditions, covering what area,
and so on.The goal of Sky is to create a general
framework that will enable users to access images,
catalogs and any associated meta-data across
the full sky in a seamless manner (Szalay & Gray
2001). In short, it can deliver a view of the night
sky across the full electromagnetic
spectrum to a user in an efficient and
scalable manner.We hope that this step towards the
democratization of science will enable a new era
of visual discovery and science communication.
So Google Sky is set to become a virtual telescope that will allow anybody at any time to view the night sky as seen by the world’s most powerful telescopes. Personally, ah can’t wait.
Ref: arxiv.org/abs/0709.0752: Sky in Google Earth: The Next Frontier in Astronomical Data Discovery and Visualization