space telescopes like Hubble and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, Google Sky lets you fly deep into the visible universe for close-ups with planets, galaxies and star clusters.

But something’s been missing, say astronomers Jiangang Hao and James Annis at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. Google Sky’s view of galaxy clusters is fuzzy and incomplete. That’s because the program uses low resolution pictures to speed up image transfer over the web. To have higher resolution images, you need to add in better pictures yourself.

Luckily, Hao and Annis have made this easy. They’ve loaded about 100 scans from one stripe of the sky onto a public server at Fermilab, and made them available in Keyhole Markup Language (.kml files), the Google Earth equivalent of html files for web browsers. If you already have Google Earth, the whole thing takes a remarkably simple one-click download.

The full instructions are available in a paper posted to arXiv.org, and the files are posted on the team’s website. Enjoy!

Image: Wired.com

See Also:

• Farthest Galaxy Cluster Ever Detected
• Monster Galaxy Cluster Found in the Distant Universe
• An Astronomy Nerd’s Dream: Searchable Night Sky on Your Laptop
• NASA Needs You: 6 Ways to Help an Astronomer

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Authors: Lisa Grossman

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