Google Sky launches

They definitely need a more graceful fail for zooming too far in than a gray box in place of the tile that says "No imagery available at this zoom level."

You're scrolling around, looking in on something, and then bang the whole screen is gone, nothing but gray boxes, and you're whole sense of context is lost... This bothered me on maps, doubly so here.

cmm324• 18 years ago

You know, I wish I had this tool when I was in astronomy...it would had been a much better class.

simplegeek4• 18 years ago

You seem to have studied Astronomy so I've a question. To me, these are just bunch of some cool pictures? What information can we infer from them? I mean how further work is based on such pictures besides enthusiastic exploration?

npk• 18 years ago

It's truly amazing the quantity of information in the images you are looking at. Basically, we're trying to explain how galaxies form. The progress that's been made on the problem has been tremendous over the past 10 or 20 years, but we still have a long way to go. My hope, is that we do not figure out how galaxies form, instead, finding some new physics.

Anyhow, one highlight: By counting the same red galaxies you seen in sky's SDSS data, we have been able to measure the universal distribution of matter, and the change in "size" of the universe, through the Baryon Acoustic Oscillation.

plusbryan• 18 years ago

Why, it's the pacman ghost nebula! http://www.google.com/sky/#latitude=-70.00556654574503&l...

moog• 18 years ago

When you pull the zoom all the way back you can see the Milky Way as a sine curve.

aston• 18 years ago

That's just Google Maps doing its standard wraparound (east touches west on a sphere). The shape is more like a U.

thamer• 18 years ago

These real-world images come as a nice complement to two great Free programs, Celestia - http://www.shatters.net/celestia/ - and Stellarium - http://www.stellarium.org/

MoonAsshole• 18 years ago

Where is the moon?

Google Sky launches

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