In Google Earth, a Service for Scanning the Heavens from the New York Times reports that Google Earth has released a new version that allows you to look up at the sky and see the galaxy. The feature is described more here.

The new feature will let you virtually look up at the sky, from any location and zoom in and fly around to other locations. The images come from Sloan Digital Sky Survey, the Palomar Observatory at the California Institute of Technology and the NASA-financed Hubble.

The Google Lat Long blog has screen captures of some sky imagery. Note, to see sky images, you must download the new version of Google Earth.

Sky is available in 13 different languages including: - Arabic - Czech - Dutch - Korean - Polish - Portuguese - Russian - French - Italian - German - Spanish - Japanese - English (UK/CA)

Want alternatives to Google? No problem! ResourceShelf complied some of the alternatives to Google Earth for sky viewing.

Happy star gazing.

Related Topics: Google: Earth | Search Engines: Maps & Local Search Engines

About The Author: Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here. For more background information on Barry, see his full bio over here. See more articles by Barry Schwartz