The good folks at Google have opened up the night skies to us good earthlings. Those of us without any inclinations towards astronomy or starter telescopes can browse the stars for stunning spectacles of heavenly artistry.The images are comprised from a mosaic of images from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, the Digitized Sky Survey and the Hubble Space Telescope. Can always count on Google to flex their techdev muscle with interesting and nerdy net toys.

Video walkthrough below:

My friend and former cohort Max McNeil, pinged me these close-up shots of the lunar eclipse from last night. According to his Flickr set, he’s using a Meade LX90 and taking photos by holding his small digital camera up to the 2″ eye piece.

It always amazes me that the backyard astronomer can easily now do what was not very long ago only in the hands of big-budget labs and universities.

The University of Arizona’s HiRISE program showcases ultra high-resolution photography, consisting of a “0.5 meter reflecting telescope, the largest of any deep space mission, which allows it to take pictures with resolutions up to 0.3 m resolving objects about a meter across, or the size of a beachball.”

According to a description, “launched in August of 2005, the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) is flying onboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) mission. HiRISE will investigate deposits and landforms resulting from geologic and climatic processes and assist in the evaluation of candidate landing sites. By combining very high resolution and signal-to-noise ratio with a large swath width, it is possible to image on a variety of scales down to 1 meter, a scale currently afforded only in glimpses by landers. HiRISE will offer such views over any selected region of Mars, providing a bridge between orbital remote sensing and landed missions. Stereo image pairs will be acquired over the highest-priority locations with a vertical precision of better than 25 cm per pixel.”

While not officially a sci-fi/space über-dork (ok, maybe I am a dork for using that term), I have always been enamored with “things space.” Having missed the golden age of spaceflight, I grew up in the shadow of the Space Shuttle (not literally) and an era with promises of cities in the sky, video windows and the ubiquitous jetpack.

Having realized those days may not come any time soon or even in my lifetime, I have nonetheless enjoyed following the developments over the years. There have always been those “characters” that seem to still be pushing for that dream. People like Paul Moller, whose languishing M200X flying car, which seems to be in permanent limbo, have grabbed my attention, only to unfulfill the dream. This is in large part due to restrictions on the technology, however, and not because they don’t have vision. On the bright side, recent news has been downright rosy for commercial space travel, as evidenced by the forward-thinking duo of Virgin Galactic mega-man Richard Branson and aeronautic/space maverick Burt Rutan, of Scaled Composites.

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If you’re not already familiar with it, go visit the Astronomy Picture of the Day and then come back to visit it again every day. It’s worth a stop just for the imagery, if not also for the accompanying text description, which gives insight into whatever went on to capture the scene. I’ve been visiting every day for as long as I can remember.

Run by NASA’s Goddard Flight Center and Michigan Tech University, it has been in operation since 1995.