I just heard about Google Sky which is a new feature inside of Google Earth. It gives you star charts for your current location along with some amazing photos from the Hubble. Just like in Google Earth there are articles you can read about different stars and points of interest. All the major stars and constellations have articles written about them. Very cool.

But it gets amazingly better.

There is a flight simulator hidden in the program! After you install it, you hit Cntl+A (in Linux), Cmd+A (in Mac OSX), Cntl+Alt+A (in Windows). Yes! It works in Linux too.

For those not familiar with flight sims (which would include me), there is a list of the keyboard commands you will want to know. You can navigate quite a bit with your mouse, but you will need the keyboard to get the most out of it.

Click on the screen shot to the right to get a full size picture. I chose LAX as my airport of departure for no real reason other than I had recently been there. You will see in the pic that there are 2 push-pins. I was shocked to see them while flying. Those are stores that I had mapped in Google Earth when I was in Long Beach. The flight sim takes into account all of your personal settings inside of Google Earth. Awesome!

I heard about it from Marco’s Blog. Check out his article for more details.

Categories: Linux, Unrelated News