VOEventNet & GoogleSky

The popular Google Earth program now has a “Sky” feature: images of the entire celestial sphere, showing hundreds of millions of stars, galaxies, and other cosmic wonders. The sky-enriched version of Google Earth is being released today.

The basic layer of the sky images used is derived from the digital versions of the sky surveys conducted by astronomers in the 1980’s and 1990’s, at Caltech’s Palomar Observatory in the North, and at the Anglo-Australian Observatory in the South. The Palomar data was reprocessed at CACR before being sent to Google. Google’s technology enables the creation of layers, where a collection of particularly interesting points on the sky can be saved as a KML file, and displayed over the viewing area.

Scientists at CACR released such a layer today, as a part of the VOEventNet project. The VOEventNet layer provides real time updates of locations of two types of transient events on the sky: cosmic gamma-ray bursts, and so-called gravitational microlensing events. The gamma-ray bursts are spectacular explosions believed to be caused by the death of massive stars, as they collapse to produce black holes. The VOEventNet team plans to expand their layer to include other types of astronomical events and transient phenomena on the sky.

Read more at the Caltech press release, see also the VOEventNet website.