Continuing my series of posts regarding Google Sky and Google Earth, here is a KMZ file that will let you find some of the prominent and interesting space telescopes and satellites on Google Earth. This file includes real-time position tracking and 1 hour flight paths for:

• Swift Gamma Ray Mission (NASA)
• RoSat (NASA, UK, Germany)
• CoRoT (CNES, ESA)
• GalEx (NASA)
• COBE (NASA)
• IRAS (NASA, UK, Netherlands)
• Envisat (ESA)
• Hubble Space Telescope (NASA, ESA)
• International Space Station (Many)

This KMZ file splits down into several separate files so you can chose to select or deselect any and all of the above objects. Clicking on the satellite or telescope’s icon brings up information about that object with links to more information. Screenshots below for those who like that sort of thing.

To see more Google Earth satellite files check out the general Satellites on Google Earth post and the Chinese Space Debris post. As always, suggestions are welcomed in the comments section. For example, I had created a time-slider dependent satellite tracker but it just ended up being really annoying. Would that be something people would want? Also, as mentioned in a previous comment, I am in the process of creating a tracker that uses a Sketchup model instead of an icon. All thoughts welcome, have fun playing with these.

Orbiting Frog has been a busy place in 2008! We are only a small way into the year but already Orbiting Frog seems to have overspilled to the extent to which I feel the need to recap and regroup. So just in case you missed anything, here is a quick overview of what’s been going on here in the past couple of months.

My experimentation with Google Earth and Google Sky has led to several items being created. In Google Earth, the ISS Locator, 100 Brightest Satellites Tracker and the Advanced Any Satellite Tracker have all been very popular and downloaded a combined 5,600 times already. In Google Sky my SCUBA data layer has now been access over 1,500 times and for some reason has inspired several emails - thanks for those! There is also last year’s IRAS 100 Micron all sky coverage for Google Sky which I had forgotten all about.

The LookUp iPhone and iPod Touch app has also been popular. Apple featured it as a Staff Pick and it hung around in the Top 10 for some time. It is now accessed about 2,000 times a day and a recent TUAW bump has kept it visible on the Apple web apps site.

The week of the lunar eclipse led me to post a video on what would be seen. I hosted the video on YouTube to reduce server load and was quite surprised however when it became one of the top videos of the week. You can have quite laugh reading the comments on the YouTube page. No one seemed to grasp that it was made on a computer and several accuse me of tricking them.

The Orbiting Frog Shop launched not too long ago and has been selling lots of t-shirts. More designs will appear all the time so keep your eyes peeled, and if anyone spots one in the wild, I’d love to hear about it.
I have now joined the crew at the Carnival of Space by hosting the 40th edition. The Carnival is a great place to pick up new RSS feeds and bloggers.

Finally I’d just like to thank everyone for taking such an interest. Thanks for all the emails and for actually reading the blog. Now I’m off to create a real blog post (i.e. not about myself) before having some lovely Swiss lunch. Yum.

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.