The chunkiness that is tolerable with maps seems quite unnatural with astronomy. I mean, it really should feel like a spaceship.

Also, is there some reason why three people have posted the same link? Here it is again, for those who've missed it:

http://www.google.com/sky/#latitude=-70.00556654574503&l...

They definitely need a more graceful fail for zooming too far in than a gray box in place of the tile that says "No imagery available at this zoom level."

You're scrolling around, looking in on something, and then bang the whole screen is gone, nothing but gray boxes, and you're whole sense of context is lost... This bothered me on maps, doubly so here.

I liked the dust cloud http://www.google.com/sky/#latitude=-70.00556654574503&l...

Almost broken into tears, what about you Scoble?

That's no dust cloud; that's a star cloud! :-)

Oops, sorry, here is the correct URL http://www.google.com/sky/#latitude=56.66358551191311&lo...

Beautiful :)

Why, it's the pacman ghost nebula! http://www.google.com/sky/#latitude=-70.00556654574503&l...

It's a nice idea, but I don't think it'll hit home as large as Google Earth and Google Docs has. This is for a niche market.

Beware of "niche markets".

This is a truly stunning sight:

http://www.google.com/sky/#latitude=-70.00556654574503&l...

These real-world images come as a nice complement to two great Free programs, Celestia - http://www.shatters.net/celestia/ - and Stellarium - http://www.stellarium.org/

We'll know Google is truly awesome if they ever manage to launch a satellite to do their own surveying.

You know, I wish I had this tool when I was in astronomy...it would had been a much better class.

You seem to have studied Astronomy so I've a question. To me, these are just bunch of some cool pictures? What information can we infer from them? I mean how further work is based on such pictures besides enthusiastic exploration?

It's truly amazing the quantity of information in the images you are looking at. Basically, we're trying to explain how galaxies form. The progress that's been made on the problem has been tremendous over the past 10 or 20 years, but we still have a long way to go. My hope, is that we do not figure out how galaxies form, instead, finding some new physics.

Anyhow, one highlight: By counting the same red galaxies you seen in sky's SDSS data, we have been able to measure the universal distribution of matter, and the change in "size" of the universe, through the Baryon Acoustic Oscillation.

Thank you, npk. Amazing stuff.

When you pull the zoom all the way back you can see the Milky Way as a sine curve.