Tag: ASTRONOMY

Google Sky Map for Android has just been updated to bring us the exciting features of multi-touch pinch-to-zoom and Time Travel! The official site hasn't been updated yet, but you can definitely pick it up from the Android Market on your phone -- the QR code is included after the break. While pinch-to-zoom is nice, the Time Travel feature is something that Sky Map users have long been clamoring ...

The best collection of Linux educational software for all ages that I know of is the openSUSE-Edu Li-f-e (Linux for Education) Live DVD. You can get it at http://en.opensuse.org/Education/Live#Download. There are some screen shots here. This is a Live DVD - you simply place the DVD in the computer's DVD drive and reboot the machine from it. When the machine comes up, you will be running ...

Microsoft has launched a public beta of its WorldWide Telescope software. Basically, WorldWide Telescope is like Google Earth or Virtual Earth for the sky. It's a desktop application that lets you browse astronomical photos stitched together. There's more than a terabyte of high resolution imagery available, but you don't need a massive hard drive to access it since WorldWide Telescope ...

If you are an Astronomy buff like me, you've probably wished that you could see a better view of the night sky, besides the one from your kid's binoculars that don't really make anything look great. Perhaps you have trouble finding things in the night sky, like me. I have found three great apps that let you do just that. First is Meade's TeleStar software (click on TeleStar software on the page). ...

One of these days I expect Google to come out with "Google Galaxy" or some similar outward-looking companion Google Earth. But we don't need to wait for Google, as there's some good free offerings out there for people wanting to stargaze from the comfort of their computer. Among them is Stellarium, an open source, multi-platform desktop planetarium. Stellarium features over 120,000 catalogued ...

For the interplanetary traveler, Google has launched Google Mars which lets you pan and zoom around the red planet's surface. It gives you three different views: visible, color-coded elevation, and infrared. Unfortunately there's no cheesy easter eggs a la Google Moon, but there are a bunch of markers for locating landmarks (including the legendary "face" and the less well-known Happy ...