Out of this World Google Maps

Astronomy Star Finder

NGC 5866

I love Google Sky and can spend hours looking at the amazing celestial sights on this night time map. That task just got easier with this mashup of Google Sky with a database of 250,000 stars.

It is possible to search the database using a SAO or HD number, or a PGC, NGC or UGC catalog number. The site has also created a number of specialist lists of stars. The lists are, Named Stars, Bright Star List, Messier Objects, Herschel 400, ARP Peculiar Galaxies.

Each of the lists include quick links to the stars in that category.

Via: Ogle Earth

Previous Google Sky Mashups

Hertszptung-Russell Diagram

The Barnabu blog has produced an interactive Hertszprung Russell Diagram map of 3000 nearby stars. The map uses the Goolgle Earth plug-in to portray a scatter plot of stars’ luminosity vs colour.

The map displays 3000 nearby stars from the Hipparcos catalogue. The European Space Agency's Hipparcos satellite operated for four years between November 1989 to March 1993 and was dedicated to the measurement of stellar parallax and the proper motions of stars.

HeyWhat'sThat Cosmic Visibility

HeyWhat'sThat is a website that generates a horizon view for any given location. The site includes the option to open a 'Sky' view that overlays the celestial sphere with the horizon, visible summits and an azimuth-altitude grid for that location at the current time.

HeyWhat'sThat also uses the Google Earth browser plug-in to portray the night sky.

Star Viewer

This is my own mash-up of Google Sky and videos of celestial animations from the European Space Agency and YouTube.

A number of celestial objects are presented in a right hand menu. If you click on one of the menu items the celestial object is shown on a map of the night sky. If you click on the tagged object a video animation is then displayed on top of the map.

SIMBAD Astronomical Database and Google Sky

In design and interaction this mash-up resembles Google's own web based Sky. However it is so much more than Google Sky. When you search for a celestial object in Google Sky you are shown the resulting map tiles in your browser. If you undertake the same search in the SIMBAD Astronomical Database and Google Sky you not only get to view the stunning imagery of Google Sky but you receive all the data available from the SIMBAD database as well.

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