It is cool, yes, but I want to also express some caution.
When you display the SIMBAD objects in GoogleSky there is a potential for great confusion. For example, there is no indication of the positional uncertainty. All you see are symbols and these more often that not do not correspond to any object visible in the DSS or SDSS image. Of course, many of the objects are from different bandpasses -- x-ray sources or molecular clouds or whatever -- and may have no obvious optical counterparts anyway.
This is no different from Aladin or any of the other visualization tools we have for VO users, save for the fact that the VO tools in the astronomy community are designed for astronomy-aware users who typically ask to see catalogs of interest as motivated by astrophysical research questions. GoogleSky opens up these rich but intrinsically complex datasets to a potentially huge community, and there is a potential for significant confusion and misunderstanding. (Note also that the geometric projection that GoogleSky uses is worthless at the poles.) I am not suggesting that we should not provide this kind of access, but we need to think a bit more carefully about how the capabilities of GoogleSky plus KML-based catalogs will help people to understand astronomy.
Perhaps we can have a discussion on this topic at the Interop in Cambridge.
Bob
On 9/5/07 7:53 PM, "Chenzhou CUI" <ccz-at-bao.ac.cn> wrote:
> Cool! > > The astronomy applications for Google Sky are increasing rapidly. It > seems that Google Sky becomes a potential competitor of VO portals, i.e. > Aladin. > > Cheers, > > > Thomas Boch wrote: