National Radio Astronomy Observatory

KML Now!

 National Virtual Observatory
KML Now! has been discontinued. It was developed by Ron DuPlain and Jared Crossley at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory.
You can download the source (.tar.bz2, .zip).

How KML Now! was used:

  1. Enter search coordinates, right ascension, declination, and radius, and select image services to query.
  2. Click the "Cone Search" button and save the resulting KML file.
  3. Open the KML file in Google Earth.
  4. Look for the new images in the "Places" pane on the left.
  5. Double-click an item in the places menu to go to it.

Examples:

These two images show the center of the Milky Way as seen in Google Sky. The left image shows the Google Sky default background, with data from the optical Sloan Digital Sky Survey. The right image contains an overlay of a KML Now-imported image taken by the Infrared Astronomical Satellite.

These two images demonstrate how different the center of our galaxy looks at different wavelengths. In optical light, the Milky Way's center is obscurred by dust. In contrast, infrared light passes through the dust mostly unaffected.

 Composite image showing the Milky Way's center in Google Sky, before and after running KML Now.

These images show the Kepler supernova remnant as seen in Google Sky. The left image shows the Google Sky default background, with data from the Hubble Space Telescope and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. The right image contains an overlay of a KML Now-imported image from the NRAO Very Large Array Archive Survey.

Comparison of these optical and radio images demonstrate that supernova remnants are often brighter at radio wavelengths than at optical wavelengths.

 Composite image showing the Kepler supernova remnant in Google Sky, before and after running KML Now.

How KML Now! Worked:

Technical details about KML Now! are explained in an article (PDF) published by SPIE Newsroom, and in this poster presented at the January 2009 meeting of the American Astronomical Society.

KML Now! was developed by Ron DuPlain and Jared Crossley at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory.
Visit the development wiki here.

KML Now! made use of US-NVO, wcs2kml, Python, STIFF, ImageMagick, django, bash, sed, and GNU/Linux.

The National Radio Astronomy Observatory is a facility of the National Science Foundation operated under cooperative agreement by Associated Universities, Inc.