Well what do you know, as soon as I make myself a wavelength slider for Google Sky, Google go ahead and pass me by by releasing the much anticipated web version of Google Sky complete with wavelength sliders. I still like my little mashup but I look forward to playing with (and taking apart) their new application as well.
Check it out: http://www.google.com/sky/
UPDATE: New Google Earth tracking files for Space Telescopes are now up.
Hot on the heels of putting all the SCUBA data onto Google Sky, I am now sharing some Google Earth goodies. The KML files below will allow you to view the location of any satellite on Google Earth with latitude, longitude and altitude positions updated every 30 seconds.
These Google Earth overlays use the NORAD two-line element (TLE) datasets that are published via the Celestrak website and are used by satellite enthusiasts the world over. I could not find them for Google Earth so have made them available myself.
There are three files that can be downloaded:
1) ISS Locator - A simple file that just tracks the position of the most popular and asked after satellite, the manned International Space Station. Shows the next 2 hours of flight path and the approximate size of the viewing horizon of the ISS (i.e. the area of the Earth’s surface for which the ISS is potentially visible).
2) 100+ Brightest Objects - This file uses Celestrak’s 100 or so brightest objects TLE file to show the locations on Google Earth of between 100-200 of the better known and easier to spot satellites.
3) Advanced Tracker - By default this KML file tracks the ISS from the 100+ file above. However it allows you to change the source TLE and satellite ID to any that you like, thus making it the first Google Earth addition that allows you to track any satellite at all! Instructions are found in the file by clicking its name in Google Earth. This layer also shows the viewing horizon and 2 hour flight path.
Download ISS Locator, 100+ Brightest Objects and Advanced Tracker.
Download All three files together in a zipped archive.
Over the summer I created a Google Sky layer that enabled anyone to access the entire SCUBA submm catalogue of maps and objects in a dynamic fashion. Google Sky was released in August and the open file format means anyone can create data for display. This layer is now publicly available thanks to help from the Canadian Astronomy Data Centre (CADC), the Joint Astronomy Centre (JAC) and my colleagues at Cardiff University.
All you have to do is install the latest version of Google Earth and then download this KML file.
Once initialized for the first time, the file will make a download of a 9MB catalogue. This takes a minute or two and once complete you can roam the sky, viewing any regions of it covered by SCUBA in submillimetre wavelengths.
As well as the data points (which appear in green) you can also view images taken by the SCUBA camera. These will only load when you are close enough on the sky to see them, to save on time and disk space.
The best thing about this Google Sky layer is that it will enable you to place side-by-side things which you can’t see with things that you can. The image below of the Horsehead Nebula is a perfect example.
In the top, in purple you can see the optical light. This is the outline of the classic Horsehead, which is located in Orion. In orange below it, you can see the dusty, SCUBA-mapped material. It slots almost perfectly into the dark region of the Horse’s head. That’s because the reason the Horse’s head exists is that the dust obscures he light and creates the shape.
If you look carefully you’ll see the ‘lozenge’ of dust in the horse’s throat. This is a clump of cold material, with a submillimetre source at the centre (the green hexagon). This is thought to be a pre-stellar core - an object which may go on to form a star.
This ‘dust’, as it is called by astronomers has the consistency of smoke and accounts for huge amount of the material in our galaxy. Many of the shapes of the nebula you will have seen arise from dark, dusty material in between the light and your point of view.
You will possibly be familiar with dust from images such as he Pillars of Creation from the Eagle Nebula. This shown below with the SCUBA map layered on top, semi-transparently.
Included with the SCUBA Google Sky layer is a set of interesting features, which will take you to certain objects or regions of the sky, to get you started. All the green hexagons come with a popup of scientific data from the CADC catalogue.
For more screenshots, see my Flickr photo set about this project.
SCUBA was a camera on the James Clark Maxwell Telescope (JCMT) in Hawaii. It was a submillimetre continuum array receiver, with a field of view 2.3 arcmin in diameter. It had two hexagonal arrays of detectors, which mapped a fair chunk of the sky in 850 microns and 450 microns.
The device was made to study regions of the universe normally dark in optical frequencies. The things you’ll see in the SCUBA data are dusty areas of our galaxy and of more distant galaxies. These are the areas where stars are born and they are being studied all the time by researchers like myself and my colleagues.
This layer adds to a growing collection of ways to look at Google Sky. there are already layers for
Download the SCUBA Google Sky KML file here (approx 1.0kB) This will officially launch later in the week, so if you have trouble try forcing Google Earth to refresh the KML file by right-clicking and selecting ‘Revert’ or ‘Refresh’.
There are big ideas and then there are big ideas. The Large Synoptic Survey telescope is a massive idea. The proposal is to build a telescope in Chile that will survey the entire sky in just a matter of days, at high resolution.
The team have drafted in Google to assist with their massive data operation. They will be using a 10 square degree field of view camera with a 3.2 gigapixel resolution. Using this device the telescope will output 30 terabytes of data per night! That makes 150 petabytes over the course of one month (source: Astronomy Blog). A petabyte, in case you don’t know is 1024 TB, which in turn are 1024 GB.
Bill Gates is also backing the project with some of his own money, as well as a series of other investors who clearly have been sparked by the ambition and grandeur of this endeavour.
By imaging and then reimaging at such a short interval, this telescope will mean that you can make stop-motion movies of events as they occur in the universe. Supernovae, comet tails, binary stars and anything else with a day-or-longer timescale could be captured as a series of time frames.
The aim is to make all the data publicly accessible by 2013, which will mean a huge step forward in the distribution and availability of images of the universe in which we live.
Stuart (Astronomy Blog) has been busy working on the telescope XML that has been discussed before. Well he has actually posted some working feeds in what he called STML (see post title).
In response I’ve tried to create Google Sky equivalent KML files. These just read in the STML feeds and put a little icon onto Google Sky with a bit of information from the feeds.
Download the Telescope STML Feeds Google Sky Tracker here
It’s a work in progress and I hope that Stuart will keep expanding the idea. I think it has lots of potential. In fact I’m doing a talk about it tomorrow.
I have been playing with Google Sky recently. As a sort of case-study, I made for myself a little script that overlays data from NASA’s SkyView website onto Google Sky. If you don’t know, SkyView dubs itself a ‘virtual telescope’. Essentially its a way to look up regions of the sky with any of a large number of surveys. Can you see what an astronomical object looks like in UV or in Infrared, for example.
Combining SkyView and Google Sky would, in my opinion, be a true archival telescope. Allowing you to point and zoom and spin about the whole sky, choosing the wavelength of your choice as you go from old archived surveys. Thus I have made a single-survey example of such an idea in action, using the IRAS 100 micron survey (infrared).
All of SkyView’s data is public domain and the images grabbed by the script are simply the small ones that SkyView would serve you upon searching their database. This makes the load on both your and their server much lighter than using any other method.
Below is a screen capture of Orion in the IRAS 100 micron band. The colour table has been chosen to show off this particular wavelength. Colour tables for other wavelengths would have to be picked individually to give the best look and feel.
Let me know what you think of this. I would like to do more, but there are a lot of surveys and I’m not sure how to structure the KML. Should it simply be a case of each survey having its own KML file and layer in Google Sky? A better approach might be to combine surveys by wavelength within Google Sky folders.
Your feedback, as always, is much appreciated.
Download the KMZ file for the IRAS 100 micron overlay by clicking here.
An aside: The green hexagons you can see all over this image are for another Google Sky project I am working on. More to follow in a few days.
Just a quick one before I finally go to bed. Check out Wikisky (Link). It basically Google Maps but for space. It only covers data from IRAS and the Sloane Digital Sky Survey so far but its a lot of fun to look at the sky so easily in these wavelengths if you haven’t before.
