Google Earth Adds Astronomical Viewing Facility

August 23, 2007: Popular mapping service, Google Earth, has added a new virtual telescope feature, known as Sky, that lets users switch their vision to space and explore far-away galaxies, nebulae and other astronomical objects.
As well as being able to view aerial photographs of selected locations on Earth and see high-resolution photographs of features in the terrain, users of Version 4.2 of Google Earth can now explore space through a series of images provided by the Digital Sky Survey Consortium, which includes the Anglo-Australian Observatory. They can zoom in on selected areas to see close-up images from the Hubble Space Telescope and also learn about the lifecycle of a star, or even view the constellations. Images of more than 200 million galaxies and 100 million individual stars have been included in the database.

A new Switch to Sky function accesses the astronomical features.

Simple navigation buttons are provided.

Users can zoom in on selected areas.

Graphics allow viewers to learn the patterns of popular constellations.
The Sky service will be available on all Google Earth domains, in 13 languages. Google Earth 4.2 is available as a free download at http://earth.google.com/earth4.html.