Is Sky in Google Earth a Shameless Copy of the Microsoft World-Wide Telescope Project?

Google is stargazing... from Microsoft's own backyard. The Mountain View search giant today introduced an updated version of Google Earth, enabling users to explore not only the planet but also in excess of "100 million individual stars and 200 million galaxies" via the Sky option. With Sky, Google Earth virtually takes the users out of this world, but is it doing so by piggyback ridding on a Microsoft idea? The fact of the matter is that the concept behind Sky in Google Earth, made available on August 22, 2007, appears to be similar to "The World-Wide Telescope, an Archetype for Online Science" project. A technical report of Microsoft's World-Wide Telescope was authored by Jim Gray, Microsoft Research and Alex Szalay, Johns Hopkins University all the way back in June 2002.

"With Google Earth, we try to provide you with the best mapping experience possible, enabling you to virtually explore our planet. But wouldn't it be great to be able to explore the stars and galaxies as well? Today, I'm excited to announce we are launching Sky in Google Earth. You can now explore the universe from the comfort of your chair. Zoom in to distant galaxies hundreds of millions of light years away, explore the constellations, see the planets in motion, witness a supernova explosion; it's like having a giant, virtual telescope at your command -- your own personal planetarium!" revealed Lior Ron, Google Product Manager.

"The World-Wide Telescope (WWT) will emerge from the world's online astronomy data. It will have observations in all the observed spectral bands, from the best instruments back to the beginning of history. The "seeing" will always good - the Sun, the Moon, and the clouds will not create dead-time when you cannot observe. Furthermore, all this data can be cross-indexed with the online literature," Gray and Szalay explained in their project. "The World-Wide Telescope will have a democratizing effect on astronomy. Professional and amateur astronomers will have nearly equal access to the data."

As you can see via World-Wide Telescope, Microsoft planned quite a while ahead of Google to make available an online-based service designed to centralize astronomy data and make it available not only to researchers but to all Internet users. Well, it's either this or Gray and Szalay were actually predicting what the Mountain View search giant was going to achieve with the August 22 update to Google earth, However, it seems that Google simply beat the Redmond company to building a World-Wide Telescope.