Space: The Final Google Earth Frontier

It used to be if you panned up in Google Earth you saw pixelated sky and clouds, but no more, now the heavens are just a mouse click away. Google Earth has unveiled a new feature dubbed Google Sky, that brings constellations, star maps, Hubble telescope imagery and more, making Google Earth somewhat of misnomer.

The new layers can be found in the latest version of Google Earth where you'll see a new button “Switch between Sky and Earth” in the toolbar.

Sky layers are listed in the left side menu and include options like, Constellations, Backyard Astronomy, Hubble Showcase, The Moon, The Planets, User's Guide to Galaxies and Life of a Star. There's even some animations of planetary orbits.

All in all the new Google Sky in an astounding amount of data packed into an easy to navigate interface — well worth upgrading the Google Earth 4.2.

But Google Earth doesn't have its head entirely in the clouds, there's two other noteworthy new layers. The first is Google Books, which mines the Google Books project data for geographical references and overlays Google Earth with little book icons which bring up the quotes and citation information.

The Google Lat Long Blog describes it thusly:

For example, let's say that you're interested in Detroit, Michigan. After flying there in Google Earth, you'll find that one of the book icons is for “The Writings of Thomas Jefferson.” Clicking on the book icon brings up the pop-up balloon with the following text snippet:

“With respect to the unfor-tunate loss of Detroit and our army, I with pleasure see the animation it has inspired through our whole country, …”

Regrettably, due to an overlap in place-names between the U.S. and Europe, many of the books included clearly aren't referring to the areas Google's algorithms think they are (see screenshot below).

But wait, that's not all. There's also a new live traffic overlay which draws on the same data used in Google Maps recently unveiled traffic features. Once you???ve turned on the traffic overlays, you'll have links to real-time traffic and conditions in select cities.

Both the books and traffic overlays are available in previous versions of Google Earth, but for the Google Sky features you'll need to upgrade to the latest version.

The Google Books layer in action. Note that the book is referring to Oakland, Ireland. I ran across this sort of error about 10% of the time, but it's still a fun feature even with a few bugs

The Traffic Layer. Click on any dot and get real-time reports.