Sky

The Transit of Venus in Google Earth

June 5, 2012

Tonight beginning at 22:09 UTC, Venus will appear as a dark spot in front of the sun for the first time in eight years, and for the last time for more than a century — the next transit of Venus won’t occur until December, 2117.
One of the best sites to help visualize this even is using the viewer on HeyWhatsThat.com. It allows you to adjust the time and your location and get a view of exactly what the sky will be looking like. It’s quite impressive and very helpful.

As with the solar eclipse a few weeks ago, Xavier Jubier has put together some great maps to show what will be going on.
In addition to the standard map showing where the transit will be visible, Xavier also shows us a map (via Jay Anderson) that includes mean cloud cover for June, which helps to show your likelihood of actually having a clear sky with which to view the event.

As with a solar eclipse, do not look directly into the sun (even with sunglasses on) to try to view this event. There are ways to do it safely and we strongly encourage you to take those precautions.

Some great tools for information about the solar eclipse

May 19, 2012

Over the next few weeks, the earth will be seeing a series of unique celestial events. Tomorrow many of us we will be able to see a a solar eclipse, June 4 will feature a lunar eclipse, and June 6 is the Transit of Venus. As you might expect, there are great Google Earth tools to help you make the most of all three events.
For the solar eclipse, the eclipse viewer from HeyWhatsThat.com is a great way to see where the best locations for the viewing the eclipse are located.

You can use the dropdown box in the lower right corner of the site to view other simulations, both past and future. You can learn more about the features available on their site by reading this text file.
Another great resource for this eclipse is Xavier Jubier’s map.

In addition to this eclipse, he has an extensive collection of data from other eclipses from 1961 through 2039 available to view.
Tomorrow’s eclipse should be visible to many of our readers, weather permitting. Let us know if you’re able to see it!

UFO Sightings in Google Earth

April 30, 2012

For centuries, humans have been witnessing UFOs in the sky. What those objects actually were may never be known, but the vast quantity of reported sightings in the last 150 years is quite amazing.
Created back in 2005, this UFO Sightings KMZ file still seems to be the most comprehensive of its kind. The map was created by Poly9, who was acquired by Apple a few years ago and no one seems to have updated the file since then. However, the file contains thousands of sightings each with details on what was seen:

UFOmaps.com contains somewhat more recent information and uses a nice Google Maps interface to display it, but nothing past 2010 is in there.
The National UFO Reporting Center is very up to date, and their data was used in the original KMZ file, but they don’t seem to have any kind of geospatial solution in place to view the data.
There have also been a number of UFO sightings in Google Street View. Some are listed on UFOsearchonline.com and you can find a few others by searching for “UFO” in the Google Earth Hacks Street View database.
Whether you believe in true UFO sightings or not, Google Earth is a great platform from which to view the patterns of sightings and explore what people may or may not have seen.

Satellites around the earth

February 1, 2011

A few years ago, Frank showed you a great visualization from AGI that shows the real-time positions for over 13,000 satellites around the Earth. That post, along with the page he built to show off the visualization using the Google Earth plug-in, have been some of our most popular pages ever, having been viewed nearly 200,000 times!

With that in mind, we thought we’d show you all of the great ways to view this data so that new users that may have missed it the first time around can see it as well. The Google Earth files below will automatically update every 30 seconds with the current positions of every satellite, so you can just sit back and watch.
There are three great ways to view these satellites:
1 – The official KML file

Google Earth File. You must have GE installed.

2 – Via the Google Earth Plug-in

3 – Watching the video below

As BoingBoing pointed out last year, these 13,000 satellites “represent an infinitesimal drop in the overall volume of their orbits”, but it’s still an amazing display. Thanks to AGI for providing such a great tool to view these satellites.

Simulating the upcoming lunar eclipse

December 20, 2010

Early tomorrow morning, December 21, there will be a total lunar eclipse. It will be completely visible to those in North America (assuming clear skies, of course) and people in Europe will be able to see the beginning of it.
For the solar eclipse this past summer, we showed you the great tool that was created by Michael at HeyWhatsThat.com.
He’s back again with a similar tool to determine the best time to view the lunar eclipse from your location. Check out the tool here to see when you should step outside to view the eclipse.

If you’re not in a location that can view the eclipse, or if cloud cover obscures your view, NASA has a live feed that you can tune into to see the eclipse as it happens. UPDATE: Or watch it live in Google Earth using Slooh.
(via GoogleMapsMania)