I love Google products, in fact I use almost everything they offer – Googlemail, Google Reader, Google Maps, Google Calendar, Picasa, and this blog is hosted using Blogger (another Google product).
One of my favourites is Google Earth. This software allows you to look at a globe of the planet and zoom into any location, even down to street level in major cities. There’s additional information organised into layers, so you can place the current weather conditions over the globe, go on a user-submitted sight-seeing tour of the world, including photographs taken of particular locations, or look at the actual terrain of Snowdonia or the Grand Canyon for instance.
A new feature added in the latest version, 4.2, allows you to look at the section of night sky directly above the land location you’re hovering over, just by clicking on “Switch to Sky” in the menu. If I zoom in on my street in East London for instance, directly above it *right now* (even though I can’t see it with all the light pollution around here!) is the constellation of Perseus. The program allows you to zoom in and, in this example, centre on the ‘Dusty Spiral Galaxy” . Zooming in even further reveals a full-colour picture of the galaxy taken by the Hubble telescope.
I can waste hours playing with this particular program. It’s not a long download if you have a broadband connection, and you can install it easily whether you’re using a Windows PC, a Mac or if you’re running one of the linux distributions (I use Ubuntu, but more on that some other time).
It’s great – why not see for yourself!