Google, having brought the Earth into our living rooms, has turned its eye to the heavens to bring us the sky at night.

About 250 million people have used Google Earth’s satellite pictures to look at their homes – or their neighbours’ – from space, or to view weird and wonderful geological features.

The internet facility has now been expanded, as part of the Google Sky initiative, to offer a glimpse of 100 million individual stars and 200 million galaxies. The system has been designed to show the night sky from any point in the world and to explain what the user would see were they to peer up at the stars on a clear night.

Information on 20,000 celestial bodies, including stars, planets, galaxies, constellations and comets, are available at the click of a mouse.

Just as Google Earth shows the planet in close-up by providing access to satellite pictures, Google Sky offers photographs from a range of observatories, including the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope.

Thousands of images have been put together to provide a comprehensive view of the night sky, and the system has the ability to zoom in on cosmic features of interest. The pictures were already available to the public through the internet, but the Google site is designed to bring them together in an organised, easy-to-access manner.

The facility was created in partnership with a range of organisations including Nasa, the United Kingdom Astronomy Technology Centre and the Anglo-Australian Observatory.

Among the cosmic subjects with dedicated areas on the website are the constellations, photographs from Hubble, the Moon and the planets.

Users can also take virtual tours through galaxies such as the Ursa Minor Dwarf and the Milky Way, and watch the life of a star from formation to supernova and beyond.

Information and pictures provided by Google Sky have been verified by professional astronomers, but additional details can be added to the site in “layers”. In one layer a professional astronomer has included details of dozens of solar systems that are known to have planets.

Enthusiasts can add their own information, whether to note the discovery of an exploding star or simply to offer a photograph of the sky from their own back garden, in associated layers. Some, after being checked for accuracy and suitability, will eventually be incorporated within the main site.

Francisco Diego, an astronomer at University College London, said at the launch at Google’s offices in London yesterday that the internet facility would be an aid to professionals and amateurs. “It opens a window on to space for the general public that will let them explore the sky,” he added.

Carol Christian, of the Space Telescope Science Institute in the United States, was part of the team that created the site which, she said, would allow everyone to see “the wonders of our Universe”.

She added: “Never before has a road-map of the entire sky been made so readily available. Sky in Google Earth will foster and initiate new understanding of the Universe by bringing it to everyone’s home computer.”

1609 Galileo first demonstrated his telescope on August 25
Source: Times database

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