Sunday, February 18, 2007

The Great Gig in the Sky

Thanks to Bizk for pointing me to http://wikisky.org/, which works a bit like google maps for the sky. It also implements links to Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), an on-going astronomical survey aiming to provide detailed images of more than a quarter of the sky in - addition to a 3-d map of about a million galaxies and quasars.

While I'm at it, let me recommend Celestia; a free program 3d-visualising data (stars, planets, moons and other satellites, galaxies, etc.) from the Hipparcos database of stars. Certainly helps you appreciate the scales astronomy operates with.
Available for pc, mac and linux.

1 comments:

Milo Johnson said...

Don't forget Stellarium, at:
http://stellarium.org/ - a great planetarium program for PC which also provides a wonderful all-sky planetarium combined with the Digitarium Alpha 2 planetarium projection system.