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The Milky Way in radio light

This Google Earth layer shows the Milky Way in radio continuum light, at a frequency of approximately 2.6 GHz. These images were created from data taken by the Parkes (64-m diameter) radiotelescope in Australia, and the Effelsberg (100-m diameter) radiotelescope in Germany.

The majority of the bright emission seen in the image is from hot, ionized gas, or is produced by energetic electrons moving in magnetic fields. The intensity of the emission is color-coded, with the brightest regions appearing red and the faintest areas appearing purple and black.

Click here to view in Google Earth.

Combining the Parkes and Effelsberg data in this way was originally undertaken for the Multiwavelength Milky Way project. The Parkes Radio telescope is a part of the Australia Telescope, funded by the Commonwealth of Australia for operation as a National Facility managed by CSIRO. Much of this work was undertaken while Roy Duncan was working with the Max-Planck Institute for Radioastronomy as a Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.

Asteroids: where are they now?

This Google Earth layer shows the positions of the five hundred brightest asteroids, from "1 Ceres" to "500 Selinur" (although Ceres is classified as a dwarf planet). A time slider allows the positions and motions of the asteroids to be viewed over a full day, a full month or a full year. The files include the names, positions and apparent magnitudes of each asteroid, plus distances from both the Sun and Earth, at each time step.

View in Google Earth View the day-long version in Google Earth.

View the month-long version in Google Earth.

View the year-long version in Google Earth.

The day-long version calculates the positions of the asteroids once per hour, starting at 00 hr UTC and ending at 24 hr UTC, on the current UTC day. The month-long version calculates the positions of the asteroids once per day, at 00 hr UTC, for the current month. The year-long version calculates the positions of the asteroids once per week, starting at 00 hr UTC on 01 January, for the current year.

These files are approximately 0.4 MB, 0.6 MB and 1.2 MB in size, respectively. Note that, if the data need to be recalculated, there may be a pause of up to approximately ten seconds when you click.

The positions of asteroids calculated herein are geocentric, which means that they are appropriate for an observer situated at the centre of the Earth. Topocentric KML data for individual objects, including asteroids, will soon be available for defined observatories.

Image galleries

Both the latest image gallery and the users' image galleries have links to images which can be viewed in Google Earth.

What are telescopes currently observing?

If any telescope-net telescopes are currently observing, links will appear here to allow you to follow the observations in Google Earth. These links are also available from the front page of this website.

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