Sunday, March 16, 2008

Google's Sky service now also on the web - no extra software!

The planetarium/visualization software released last year is no longer necessary to bring the sky to your computer: a website is offering the same, with highly zoomable real images from sky surveys. It works just like Google Maps and is pretty fast and smooth.

In other news it is noteworthy that many Cassini images from the Enceladus flyby have stars in the background as the Saturn moon was in the shadow! The flyby was not as smooth as it first seemed, with a key dust instrument failing at a bad time. • Here's an unusual paper about micrometeorite impacts into space telescopes of the grazing kind - which are pretty common.

• Clips from a live TV report from 1979 from the last total solar eclipse in the U.S. are available, 10 minutes in total (fine picture and sound quality)! And there are thoughts about observing solar eclipses from the Moon which has been done only once and in poor quality. • The light curve of Halley's comet at all timescales has been analyzed in Russia. • And there are speculations about another real planet in our solar system ...

1 comment:

Poetic Vine said...

Thank you for posting this. :) It even works fairly well on my computer, which is a too-old, fairly stubborn machine.