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Google Universe
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With the commissioning of Sky, Google expands our universe
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Innovative streak Thomas Krampe, head of the Hamburg planetarium, speaks during a presentation of Google Sky at the planetarium in Hamburg, northern Germany on August 22, 2007
United States Naval officer and NASA astronaut Sunita Williams made an interesting observation about her six-month stay in the International Space Station. She said the earth was a ‘borderless’ entity when looked from outer space and ever
ything about space was ‘spectacular’. For those who may not be able to make it to space, for all the wannabe astronauts and others there is an exceedingly beautiful program called Google Sky that gives a virtual tour of the cosmos. Imagine zooming through the space without frontiers, stars whistling past by you and through constellations and right into galaxies. All you need to do to become a celestial wayfarer into galactic unknowns is to sit in front of your computer.
The new Sky module lets users explore the planets, stars, constellations and galaxies of the night sky, including high-resolution highlights from the Hubble Space Telescope and useful information overlays.
Access: Go to http://earth.google.com/sky/skyedu.html or to access it from Google Earth, users need to only click ‘Switch to Sky’ from the ‘view’ drop-down menu in Google Earth, or click the Sky button on the Google Earth toolbar. The interface and navigation are similar to that of the standard Google Earth steering, including dragging, zooming, search, ‘My Places,’ and layer selection.
Benefits: Much like the universe that is expanding, Google is expanding its planetary programs. Google Earth, a virtual geography program, combines ‘terrain data and imagery’ and presents three-dimensional view of our planet. Donning a new avatar, it now includes a new feature called Sky that provides users to zoom through ‘100 million individual stars and 200 million galaxies’. Sky has layers exhibiting different constellations, user guides to planetary positions, animations, which enhance the viewer’s experience.
“You can flip up and see the constellations and search for stars, galaxies, nebulae and fly through space inside Google Earth,” says Google spokesman Jason Chuck. “There have been a lot of interesting space events recently, such as the Perseid meteor showers, and with lots of kids going back to school we hope this can be really useful in the classroom too.” It also gives a great leeway for users to come up with their own annotations and share them with their friends.
As Lauren, a user, attests to it about the enormousness and vastness of space: “One thing that happens when you use Google Earth a lot is you gain a better feeling for scale - the relative sizes of cities, countries, mountain ranges, continents.
Being able to zoom in and out exponentially, all while traversing small and large distances, gives you a very good mental grasp of the orders of magnitude encountered in earth-based cartography.
I think that this ability to visualize large variations in scale is a big part of what Avi Bar-Zeev calls ‘high spatial cognition’, and GE is a great way to train your mind to develop it.”
With a huge database of imagery and annotations, with layers exhibiting interesting things right in front of you on the PC, Google Sky promises to be one helluva feature that makes one visualize ‘large variations’ on the level of cosmos. Download it for a celestial rendezvous.
G.B.S.N.P. VARMA
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