* Astronomy

A new interactive digital map developed by an Australian software designer uses the  Google Earth paradigms extensively to bring to life the evolution of Australian coastline on your desktop.
The transition of Australasia can now be visualised through the new digital map that mimics the rise and fall of sea levels over the past 100,000 years, and it would provide key answers to questions of migration of humans to the continent.
Images and text about key archaeological sites accompany the possible routes that were undertaken by humans to Australia during the last Ice Age.

"What I've done is take a lot of the paradigms of Google Earth and extend them by the extra dimension of time" - Matthew Coller.

Coller, who presented his map at the recent Australasian Archaeological Conference at the University of Sydney, has used data of the sea floor and changes in sea level around Australia and Asia from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and Geoscience Australia. He has named the map as Sahul Time, after the name of the ancient continent of Australia and New Guinea, and hopes that it will be useful for archaeologists in visualising their data and testing theories.

"It puts archaeologists' discoveries into the geo-morphological context" - Matthew Coller.

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Google Earth - version 4.2.0196 - released.

Download (12.79mb, exe)

Title: Sky in Google Earth: The Next Frontier in Astronomical Data Discovery and Visualization
Authors: Ryan Scranton, Andrew Connolly, Simon Krughoff, Jeremy Brewer, Alberto Conti, Carol Christian, Brian McLean, Craig Sosin, Greg Coombe, Paul Heckbert
(Version v2)

Astronomy began as a visual science, first through careful observations of the sky using either an eyepiece or the naked eye, then on to the preservation of those images with photographic media and finally the digital encoding of that information via CCDs. This last step has enabled astronomy to move into a fully automated era -- where data is recorded, analysed and interpreted often without any direct visual inspection. Sky in Google Earth completes that circle by providing an intuitive visual interface to some of the largest astronomical imaging surveys covering the full sky. By streaming imagery, catalogues, time domain data, and ancillary information directly to a user, Sky can provide the general public as well as professional and amateur astronomers alike with a wealth of information for use in education and research. We provide here a brief introduction to Sky in Google Earth, focusing on its extensible environment, how it may be integrated into the research process and how it can bring astronomical research to a broader community. With an open interface available on Linux, Mac OS X and Windows, applications developed within Sky are accessible not just within the Google framework but through any visual browser that supports the Keyhole Markup Language. We present Sky as the embodiment of a virtual telescope.

Read more (106kb, PDF)

Google  has long claimed earthly omniscience, but the web giant's reach is expanding to the rest of the universe, thanks to astronomers at Edinburgh's Royal Observatory.
Google Sky, which now allows internet users to take a tour of the cosmos without leaving home, was developed using maps of Scottish researchers.
The key function of the new application is the use of maps and charts overlaid on to the night sky, making around 100 million solar systems and 200 million galaxies available for online perusal.

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