The Sky in Google Earth
Google’s latest version of Google Earth now lets you explore the night sky:
They’ve incorporated several datasets from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, NASA/Space Telescope Science Institute, and Digital Sky Survey Consortium (which is a collaboration of many datasets, including Palomar’s sky survey). I was playing with it today and really thought it was cool.
I still like Stellarium and Celestia better because the rendering in Google Earth is not as good as the other two programs. Stellarium is better designed planetarium program because, well, that’s all it does. Google Earth suffers from trying to do too much and being all things to all people.
Celestia is much better at designing space visualizations like eclipses and similar astronomical events from a variety of perspectives. I’m using Celestia now to make several scenes for my next video, Life in the Universe #2.
One can’t complain too loudly though because Google Earth is free, and it does many things very well. For my needs though, I prefer programs specifically designed to render and visualize the night sky.
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