Saturday, April 24, 2010

Hubble Telescope's 20th Anniversary

Today is the 20th anniversary of the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope. The telescope has proved a huge success and has returned some of the most incredible images ever taken of space.

Google Sky

One of the best ways of viewing the images taken by the Hubble Telescope is to view them in situ in Google Sky. Google Sky includes a Hubble Showcase (accessible from the menu at the bottom of the page).

The Hubble Showcase lets you view some of the most spectacular images captured by Hubble and view them in context with Google's Sky map.

Star Viewer

One of the most interesting showcases of Hubble over the years has been the European Space Agency's Hubblecast series of videos. The Hubblecast videos have been exploring the images captured by Hubble and explaining what they teach us about the the Universe.

Over the last couple of years I've been geotagging the videos with the Google Maps API so that you can watch the videos embedded in the Google Sky map.

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