Space, man

I know, I know; Google coverage must sound like a broken record. But I defy you not to be impressed by Google Sky. Google Earth was an excellent exercise in taking a set of data, and openning it to the public for scrutiny, notation and all kinds of use and abuse. From tracking hurricane damage using NOAA imagery to spotting flying cars and spotting Matt and Andy sunbathing, Google Earth has become more than the sum of it's parts; a gigantic corkboard for everyone and anyone to add information, browse or explore.

Now Google is doing this with the heavens. The best bit, of course, is that as more data is collected, and more imagery produced, Google Sky has the possibility of becoming a huge resource, not just for astronomers and physicists, but everyday human beings, too .

There are two things of interest here; firstly, Google has mastered the tricky job of depicting large data sets in a manner that is intuitive to use. The old spinning globe idea is not new; heck, anyone who read Snow Crash is familiar with the concept, and the fact that alternate reality entrepreneurs are modelling their businesses around the idea of the Metaverse.  However, Google is the first to bring the level of detail - and shared information - to the concept. How much data can be added to Google Sky? On top of that, as rthe resolution of images increases, how is this data reassigned?

Secondly, how will the average public react? There's an incentive to add data to Google Earth - the user may have travelled to a spot, or know what they're looking at. Astronomy is a little more, shall we say, niche, than tourism. That said, SETI has shown that, properly motivated, millions of people are interested in crunching large amounts of data, and in astronomy.

Google Sky is exciting for many different reasons, even if you're not an astronomy geek. I wonder what big dataset Google will open up to public scrutiny in an easily-accessible form next?