Caltech Contact: Roy Williams
Email: roy at cacr.caltech.edu
Website: http://www.virtualsky.org

The Virtual Sky is a portal to images of the night sky. We show the sky in many different representations and wavelengths in addition to the optical view that our eyes provide. Our main product is the Digital Palomar Observatory Sky Survey, covering the entire northern sky at about 1 arc-second per pixel. We also have the Hubble Deep Field, NVSS Radio survey, ROSAT Xray, some images from the Sloan survey, as well as Uranometria, a set of engravings from 1603 with mythological creatures. We do not do have planets, sorry, they are just too close to home!

Instructions: Click on the link to the viewer below, select "zoom in", then click on the sky. You go deeper and deeper and deeper into the sky. You can also select Recenter to pan, or Zoom out, then click on the sky to zoom out. "Galaxy Lookup" tries to find a galaxy that you click on in the NED database , and "Star Lookup" finds it in the Simbad database.

You can also choose other themes (Uranometria, Star Map) in addition to the optical. These are all co-registered to the optical sky survey so that a given star is in the same position for each theme. If you find something interesting, click the "Comments" button on the page you are viewing, so you can add to the blog .