Animated Google Sky

Eagle Nebula Scroll

Having played around with static Street View images to create an animated side view of Oxford Street in London I wondered if it was possible to do something similar with static map tiles fromGoogle Sky.

It is.

Here's an animated marquee of the Eagle Nebula. In itself it probably doesn't have many practical applications but the static images could be useful for anyone wanting to illustrate an astronomy article on the internet.

The image illustrating this post is itself a static Google Sky map tile.

Perhaps Google should create a static API for Google Sky as they have forGoogle Maps.