Google Shoots For The Stars
“You will be able to browse into the sky like never before”
After turning millions of Internet users into virtual explorers of the world with Google Earth, the Internet search giant is now hoping to turn many of them into virtual stargazers. Google is unveiling within Google Earth today a new service called Sky that will allow users to fly around and zoom in, exposing increasingly detailed imagery of some 100 million stars and 200 million galaxies. The Sky imagery was stitched together from more than one million photographs from scientific and academic sources, including the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, the Palomar Observatory at the California Institute of Technology and the NASA-financed Hubble. Google said that it developed the project strictly because some of its engineers were interested in it, and that it had no plans to make money from it for now.Microsoft has a research project called the World Wide Telescope that offers similar capabilities to Sky. The project was once headed by Jim Gray, the veteran Microsoft researcher who disappeared this year after a sailing trip off San Francisco Bay.
