OK. In reality is just another layer in GoogleEarth, but i think it is a step forward in the proper direction.
It was already a long "dream", product of the dissatisfaction I experienced with most databases, visualization tools and virtual observatories.
The impressive amount of data, already present in the astronomy world, cannot be managed coherently with the large number of heterogeneous tools that currently we are using: How long does it take for anyone to search in every observatory archive for some data? How many virtual observatories will we have in the next years? How many tools do we need to use to perform some BASIC tasks? How many databases do we have to check?
The situation can be worse in few years when the huge, digitalized databases come online. Fortunately, there are steps in the right direction. The Sloan people already have a quite good and relatively easy-to-use web page. Yet more important, they are aware of the problem and pretend to address it in the future. Some of them are participating in http://astrometry.net/ project. Thanks guys! Astrometry calibration is one of the more tedious and time consuming tasks in data analysis.
Now GOOGLE presents this tool. Currently, it is mostly useful for amateur astronomers and sky lovers, but according what I've seen in GoogleEarth, it has a huge potential grow, using the layer architecture: Maps at different wavelengths. Databases. Archive observations. Full catalogs. References to the corresponding papers. Ongoing events and more.
The grow potential is huge. I don't know the details but with plug-ins, observations could be prepared. Download the tables in the area. Load the our own images and catalogs in the display and make the proper comparisons.
And much more. Further ideas?
The image is an example of how one of the clusters, I'm currently working on, looks in "GoogleSky".
http://earth.google.com/sky/skyedu.html
