Can’t wait to get home and try this. Google Earth has now been updated to a new version that includes what amounts to Google Sky. Now you can turn your eyes away from the virtual globe and explore the universe with high resolution imagery from various telescopes and agencies. You can enter constellation names, galaxy/nebula names, Messier/NGC numbers, whatever you want. Oddly, they seem to have omitted the driving directions…
This is gonna be fun. 
It’s pretty sweet. Did you see the thing that vaguely resembles the Death Star near Lyra?
I wonder if they’ll have real time “this is what you can see in the sky” charts? Once I started looking around, I had no concept of what would be visible in my part of the world at that time. I’m definitely going to play around with it some more.
Cool. I’d heard it was coming, but didn’t realize it was available now. I’m downloading as I type.
First star to the left and on 'til morning.
It would be extra cool if you could pick a place on the earth and a time, then see what is visible from there.
Okay, it’s neat. Worth the download and all. 
There are a number of those. Another (blue) one appears between M41 and M50. They look like satellite dishes or possibly telescope reflectors. There are interesting streaks of blue and yellow light beside this one, too.
So I’ve been playing with it, and it’s pretty cool. Buggy, and a patchwork of imagery (which is understandable) but cool. It would be nice to be able to pick a point on Earth and see what’s in the night sky above you though.
Fascinating stuff but I’m seeing something a bit odd; search for “ursa major” and pan out until you can see the asterism lines and the “points of interest”. On mine I also see labels for “Hamburg, Germany”, “Eiffel Tower, France” and many others. Looks like some map is getting overlaid incorrectly.
partial screen shot
Yeah, I’m getting my pushpins showing up in space. It still won’t give me driving directions.
Speaking of Ursa, check out the tip of Ursa Minor. Some weirdness going on there, almost like a long exposure head-on shot of the Perseids through a funhouse mirror.
