4/10/2014
I explored the Google Sky to see if I can use it for my Astronomy course. The tool is sill under development, so it's not as sophisticated as Google Earth. We can not navigate to get anywhere we want to go as we can with Google Earth, and the map is not 3-d. Instead, it's a huge collection of beautiful pictures of the universe, including different constellations, galaxies, planets, etc. , which serves well as visualizations of different objects and phenomena in the universe. I look forward to seeing more happening with this google tool. It could be very useful for any level of study of the universe.
That's neat for your class.
ReplyDeleteI hope you can find a place for Google Sky -- in lieu of real observatory, I suppose it could be a great resource for teaching astronomy. (I was a teenage astronomer and can't wait -- one day -- to get a real telescope again.) In the meantime, you can take you tablet outside and hold it up to the sky -- and see all kinds of deep sky objects (with pictures from Hubble and other major observatories). There is a lot of annotated content and tours, too, so this is really a sophisticated 'portal' for getting to astronomical content -- surely there is a lesson or two for a class somewhere. I'd be interested in what you come up with for your students! (I'm sure there's a SoTL article or two on finding new uses for Google Sky in a community-college classroom in a science course.)
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