Nosral
Tourist
Reged: 08/22/07
Posts: 3
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The sky is a very nice addition to Google Earth. The images I've seen seem to be in the visible wavelengths. Are there plans to add radio, microwave, infra-red, x-ray, etc. images?
Also, how were the constellation lines chosen?
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RyanScranton
Tourist
Reged: 08/22/07
Posts: 8
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The basic imagery is optical data, yes.
However, if you download the Microwave Sky layer from the Earth gallery, you can see the sky in microwaves. This view is very important to cosmologists, but the really cool thing about it visually is that you can see that places in the Galactic plane where the sky is dark thanks to dust extinction, the microwave sky is glowing brightly thanks to the thermal emission from that dust. Also check out the locatio of the Orion nebula and the Magellanic clouds.
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Nosral
Tourist
Reged: 08/22/07
Posts: 3
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Quote:
but the really cool thing about it visually is that you can see that places in the Galactic plane where the sky is dark thanks to dust extinction, the microwave sky is glowing brightly thanks to the thermal emission from that dust.
Except that this image of the microwave sky looks like it has had the galaxy removed (at least in part) because the galactic plane has both red (brighter/hotter, I assume) and blue (dimmer/colder) spots. The WMAP space mission measured microwaves in 5 different frequencies (they all look roughly the same, except that the galaxy looks a little different in each image). Do you know if there are any plans to make more of this data available?
It would be great to have a wavelength slider in this software that went through all available wavelengths, so I could zoom in and then look at a galaxy at a whole range of wavelengths, but I'm afraid that lack of data would make the sky black most of the time.
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CarolChristian
Tourist
Reged: 03/20/06
Posts: 9
Loc: Baltimore, MD
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You bet!!
All in good time. The optical data took 2 years....
We are happy folks are interested in the multi-wavelength data and this is in the
schedule for the future.
--------------------
Dr. Carol Christian
gSky at STScI
<a href="link" target="_blank"> http://hubblesite.org/explore_astronomy/gsky/ </a>
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