The things people will do for a bit more exposure...

Mine's the dirty brown mac with the camera in the buttonhole...

Wow! In almost no time at all I found this image...

http://www.google.com/sky/#latitude=66.33970959528405&longitude=-42.44293212890625&zoom=9&Spitzer=0.00&ChandraXO=0.00&Galex=0.00&IRAS=0.00&WMAP=0.00&Cassini=0.00&slide=1&mI=-1&oI=-1

Looks like evidence for some kind of space battle to me!

Hopefully, amanfrommars will be writing a comment soon to complain about the privacy implications of this latest move by the big G.

Wow, that's odd!

Any astronomers out there want to enlighten me/us to what this is? Aside from proof of phaser-weilding stealth craft?

It kind of does. That is, until you recall that light is itself invisible, and can only be "seen" by way of the things it reflects off of or refracts through.

Still, there's no reason that couldn't be two laser beams passing through a very large dust/chaff/debris cloud.

I think I must be suffering an alcohol deficiency.

Looks like a remnant of the "LASERS" from the Alan Parson's Project.

after zooming in too the green beam i expected to see a star destroyer, but them pesky imperial scum must have developed clocking technology.

it's a satellite going across the field of view then going into eclipse.

The SDSS (visible) image is a mosaic, it is not perfectly aligned. The coloured slits are the edges of the images which composed the mosaic.

[pedant]

"the hoi polloi" is a tautology - "hoi polloi" means "the many" in Greek, so to say "the hoi polloi" is to say "the the many".

[/pedant]

=D

I must admit this thingy has lost me completely, I even tried the help & about features, no luck tho. Just what am I looking at? To start with, what does the time figure represent, and how does this correalate to a position in the sky? Which way is North & East, & doesn't it need to know where I am?

Say I want to know where a given planet will be tonight at 10pm, will this handle it, or are the times only relative (not relative in the Einstein sense, we all know that one.. or are told we do)?

Paris.. cos she used night vision too.

Spoilsport :-(

assuming they are the same Earth and Sky broadcasts we get on public radio they are well worth opening the pod bay doors for.

That so-called space battle is clearly someone having a quick game of Missile Command.

I could not help but noticing the regimented series of Monoliths (m) in the area of Ursa Major.

Now what are they up to now?

They failed spectacularly when working with the simians on this smileball. (I mean slime covered planetary body)

Bones only because weesa-all-gonna-die (bad Jar-Jar impersonation) when the galactic bypass goes right through our neighbourhood.

"Say I want to know where a given planet will be tonight at 10pm"...

Use celestia or stellarium?

@AC - Sorry for being a spoilsport. There is enough weirdness in the universe *without* the artifacts, just search for it (hint: Seyfert's sextet - no need for puny space death rays)

Rafael, amateur astrogeek

Nice to play with, but does it really have any real world use?

spamme@x86it.co.uk (Send an email to this if you want to get blocked from my mailserver!)

TinyURL? As a verb? Say it ain't so...