Google’s Earth/Sky and NASA’s WorldWind
In the interest of having more regular content on this blog, i’m going to try to post info about electronic tools useful to the astrobiology community. If anyone else out there has a cool tool they’d like to share with everyone else, go ahead and post it here…
To start, i thought i’d share a fun recent discovery with everyone – the new “sky” features in Google Earth. In short, the new version of Google Earth lets you explore the night sky using the same interface you can use to explore the Earth. If you haven’t used Google Earth before, you should check it out. The interface is very intuitive and the visuals are stunning. You can use Google Earth to zoom in on your home, place of work, field site, or favorite getaway. My fellow geologists have been using Google Earth to help them make pretty pictures for talks or to check out aerial views of their field sites before departing to collect samples/data. Additionally, Google Earth is a solid educational tool that one can use to make virtual tours of anything from a city to the ecology of a region to the history of a nation. From my understanding of things, you can pretty much make a tour of whatever you want – if you wanted, you could make a tour of all the places you’ve lived before and send it off to family for a trip down memory lane. One should be able to do all this in Google Sky as well. Someone should plot up the stars for which extrasolar planets have been discovered. That would make for a really great virtual tour for classrooms, public outreach, and anyone stands in awe of the explosion of data coming from the extrasolar planet hunters. Does anyone out there have the know-how to tackle something like this?
There’s another tool out there that’s just as cool – or maybe even cooler – NASA’s World Wind. Its Windows-only for now, but they’re currently working on a Java version that will run on Linux or Mac OS. There are LOTS of great things about WorldWind, from the ability to plot “near real-time data” on things like the weather to the ability to use it to explore other planets such as Mars, Venus, Mercury, the Moon, and Jupiter. The 3-d engine is fantastic. There’s even an astrobiology field tour that will take you to places like Akilia Island and the Rio Tinto Basin! Want to see what a sunset is like on Mars? You can do that too, as the interface includes lighting effects from the sun. Overall, its a wonderful piece of software that is very easy to use. The Kasting group was discussing some data on Mars gullies, and we wanted to know if there was a correlation between their appearance the terrain in which they formed. It was extremely easy to plug my laptop into a projector, download WorldWind, fire it up and take a look at the places the gullies were found. It was my first time using the software, and the interface was very easy to use.
I’d recommend both pieces of software to anyone. Google Earth gets a LOT more exposure and is something we should consider using for public outreach purposes, and WorldWind is much more customizable and seems to be better for plotting your own data.
Again, if you have other tools, feel free to post about them. I’m going to put up another “tools” post in the future to see what professional networking sites people are interested in using for the Astrobiology community, so check out Research Pages, Nature Network, and Facebook. In the end, we’ll probably all be using some combination of these… So check them out!
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