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Laurens Van der Post

Human beings are perhaps never more frightening than when they are convinced beyond doubt that they are right.

Sun, 11/18/2007 - 20:47 — charlie.collins

One of my daughters asked me the other day what a Supernova was. The discussion stemmed from me blabbering about A Short History of Nearly Everything, in which there is a fascinating account of the amateur astronomer Reverend Robert Evans.

Evans has been called a "savant" because he can "memorize star charts" and has visually discovered more supernovae than anyone else, from his back yard 12" telescope in Hazelbrook, Australia. So anyway, my kid cut to the quick and rather than wanting to know about some guy in Australia, wanted to know about supernovae themselves.

I tried to explain that when a massive start explodes, for various reasons, it's called a supernova. Then I went to the web and we both learned more. Space.com is great, and covers a lot of astronomy ground, we started there, and then I rememered that I had just heard about Google Sky now being part of Google Earth.

sky_supernova

Wow. Sky is impressive, and a fantastic learning/teaching aid, besides just being fun to mess around with. We started by just poking around and clicking on things, zooming in and out, tilting axes, etc - just like Earth. Then we looked at constellations, planets, galaxies and more. Finally we stumbled on the "Hubble Showcase."

sky_layers

The Hubble Showcase is one of the various "layers" that you can enable or disable. With the Hubble Showcase you get many incredible photos and guides of all sorts of stellar phenomena. That's really the amazing part - Sky doesn't just include the data, with a fantastic UI that you can manipulate just about any intuitive way you desire, but also includes a great deal of guides, explanations, pictures, and the like.

Another of the layers for example, includes an animation of the orbit of the planets.

sky_planets_motion

Imagine this kind of learning tool back in grade school, man, I would have actually paid attention in class with this! Props to Google for another great offering, and really, whether or not you have kids, or care about astronomy at all, check out Sky - it will not only make you smarter, but it's fun to use too.