Nascent

Google have just released a new version of Google Earth with Sky gazing abilities. I use the term Sky gazing rather than star gazing as some of the most impressive aspects are the ability to zoom into high resolution images of nebula, galaxies and other extended astrophysical objects. I've just been playing around with this interface for the past half an hour or so and it is, as we have come to expect, georgeous.

I think this is going to have a big impact on the participation of the general public with science. Google Earth has already made a significant impact as described in an earlier post.

Of all the areas of science, astronomy has some of the best levels of amateur involvement. After all, the data set is just lying around above our heads. Some notable examples include the group of observers who liked to keep track of spy satellites and the amazing Rev. Robert Evans whose work on detecting supernovas provided some of the best data in that field until cosmological studies industrialized the acquisition of supernova data.

Data from an astronomical experiment is usually for a specific purpose or for a specific object in the field of view, but there is often a large amount of extra data that you get for free and that might be of use to other researchers. After the initial experiment is tested the remaining data is usually opened up to the community. Virtual observatories represent a way to share this information. You have a big data server that handles requests based on wavelength, survey and position and you get the raw data. You can try for yourself here, here, or read about ongoing work here, but I think it is fair to say that these efforts are tailored to the professional astronomer and not specifically to the huge number of amateurs. Now who do we know that is good at managing the delivery of large data sets in a seamless way to large numbers of people?

I could see Google Earth providing the ability for amateurs to share their own ccd observations of the sky via kml files, and perhaps providing an easy way for the big observatories to get ground breaking results out to the public in a way that gives context (you can see where the thing is) and an immediate impact via the images that are created. How long before we get multi-wavelength overlays?

I'm tingling with excitement.

Here is my top-tip, do a search in Google Sky for "Hubble Deep Field", now zoom. Zoom again. No, keep zooming. Eventually you will see a lot of blurry little dots. Each of these is a galaxy, far, far, away.