The Space Telescope Science Institute announced the results of their cooperative effort with Google, Inc., to incorporate astronomical data into a browsable utility. It’s a start! And a pretty good one.

The latest version of the free Google Earth has a Sky function. Select “Switch to Sky” in the View pull down menu and Earth will disappear and become a celestial globe. All the commands and layers transform from geographical to celestial, allowing you to search for NGC objects, slew to coordinates, click to display Hubble images, and much more.

The above quote is sourced from ‘Sky & Telescope’. Read the whole article at: http://www.skyandtelescope.com/community/skyblog/astronomyonline/9308836.html