Slashgeo

Google Earth Blog has a full review of the new Google Sky features in GE 4.2. From the piece: "Many of us, who think Google Earth has been a wonderful tool for viewing the Earth, have asked Google to use the same tool and techniques to look at other planets and places of the universe. Sky is certainly a wonderful first step. It stays true to Google Earth's formula for success by providing high resolution imagery, intuitive and easy-to-use interface with the mouse, layers with more information, the same kind of tools for sharing and annotating places with others (placemarks, image overlays, network links, etc.), and most importantly it gives an exciting new look at places many people have never viewed with their own eyes. Just like GE opened our eyes and gave us exciting opportunities to explore our planet, this new release is already doing the same thing for the night sky."
Previous posts at GE blog link to stories of rumours of censorship with the discovery of a missing chunk of sky and the discovery of a spaceship.

First, I'm happy to announce a new financial donation to help Slashgeo.org stay not too far below the red line, ThinkGeo.com (blog entry) is now amongst the Slashgeo.org top donors. Thank you! Donors have a link to them in the right side column.

Second, I admit I'm not entirely proud of Slashgeo's geonews coverage since the beginning of the year. As most of you already know, Slashgeo is ad-free and is ran only by voluntary contributions, mainly time given by a small team of geoenthusiasts to aggregate the most pertinent geonews out there for the geospatial community. For the last two years and a half, I've had a lot of precious help from other enthusiasts who joined the Slashgeo bandwagon as editors, but I still publish most of the stories on Slashgeo at the moment. Being a new father and away from my day job for a while, I have trouble finding the required time to adequately feed Slashgeo on a regular basis. Unless something unexpected happens and instead of being myself constantly worried, I ask you, our dear users, to allow a reduction of service for the coming months until about September. This does not mean Slashgeo will stop publishing, it just means we'll more than ever rely on user contributions and, even if efforts will be done to cover the most pertinent geonews, they may be published with a delay of a few days or more. Hopefully, Slashgeo should afterward go back to our more frequent and timely geonews publishing. Thank you for your comprehension. Alex aka Satri.

The Digital Earth Blog posted an article with about this. From their summary : "According to TechCrunch, Microsoft is set to unveil a product called “Worldwide Telescope” on February 27. "

"Users will be able to pan around the nighttime sky and zoom as far in to any one area as the data will allow. Microsoft is said to be tapping the Hubble telescope as well as ten or so earth bound telescopes around the world for data. When you find an area you like, you can switch to a number of different views, such as infrared and non-visible light."

For a more detailed summary and a link to the original article, please visit the Digital Earth Blog.

Slashdot has all the information about this. This is most follow up to the Google Sky product MSFT was working on. There is a pretty good video demonstration, so please visit slashdot to get the link and discussion items.

Update : I just noticed Ogle Earth has a great review of the whole thing. Please visit their page for a highly detailed overview.
Update : The Google Earth Blog has also done an extensive review of this. Check out their page for more information.

Here is their summary : "Ted.com has a great sneak peek at Microsoft's new WorldWide Telescope project. In this video, presented by Roy Gould and Curtis Wong, you are able to see a combined view of satellites and telescopes from all over the planet and nearby space. The compiled image is rendered using Microsoft's new high-performance "Visual Experience Engine" that allows users to pan and zoom across the night sky seamlessly."

Another Deep Zoom GIS experiment unfolded today. This time, it's from the GIS in XML blog. From the blog's summary : "Just to show that I can serve a compiled Deep Zoom Silverlight app from various Apache servers I loaded this Denver example on a Windows 2003 Apache Tomcat here: http://www.web-demographics.com/Denver, and then a duplicate on a Linux Ubuntu7.10 running as an instance in the Amazon EC2, this time using Apache httpd not Tomcat: http://www.gis-ows.com/Denver Remember these are using beta technology and will requires updating to Silverlight 2.0. The Silverlight install is only about 4.5Mb so the install is relatively painless on a normal bandwidth connection."

For a live demonstration, as well as a very highly detailed link, please visit the GIS in XML blog.

nateirwin.net currently has a post about the upcoming Virtual Earth release scheduled for April 10th. From their summary, here is a list of upcoming features :

• "Enhanced experiences with bird's eye view in 3D, and new bird's eye hybrid view..."
• Reverse geocoding for U.S. users.
• Walking directions for North America and European Union users.
• Traffic-based driving directions.
• New cross-browser support.
• Improved printing support for maps.

For more information and relevant links, please visit the nateirwin blog.

Here's some recent Microsoft Virtual Earth related news. There's the information on overlaying data in shapefile format in Virtual Earth, also on the official MS VE blog. Then Microsoft announced Birds Eye view support for Apple's Safari browser, including the iPhone. The VE blog also provides a tutorial for: "In this tutorial I'll show you how to use Live Maps to build a Collection of Waypoints and then export them to your Portable Navigation Device." Note that MapQuest are Garmin planned a similar feature. And finally, an entry on the use of MS Birds Eye view for domestic solar energy estimation.