Simbad data in Google Sky

[Robert Hanisch]

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:
>> Dear Apps members,
>> 
>> We have worked the last few days on providing Simbad data in Google Sky.
>> The KML file is available here :
>> http://cdsweb.u-strasbg.fr/googlesky-pages/simbad.kml
>> 
>> Once loaded in Sky, it will retrieve Simbad objects and display them
>> with various icons according to the object type. The query is actually
>> performed if and only if the span of the current view is smaller than
>> 0.5 deg.
>> The attached snapshot gives you an overview of what it looks like.
>> 
>> Your comments and feedback are very welcome.
>> 
>> Cheers,
>> 
>> Thomas, for the CDS team
>>