Google Earth adds star maps, turns everyone into an astronomer

Google Earth is already one of the coolest time-wasters available online, allowing you to zoom around the earth and take a look at basically every patch of land on our great planet. It's a lot of fun, and it could even be considered educational by people with a relatively loose definition of the word. Now, Google's making Google Earth even cooler.

They've gone ahead and added star maps to the application, as we reported they were working on in January, allowing us to look outward as well as inward. You can zoom in on different galaxies and explore the cosmos just as easily as you can explore your own neighborhood. It's a great change of pace from seeing space photography that you can't really place in the night sky. With this, you can look up just like you would if you were standing in a field at night, if only you had telescopes for eyes. Maybe that'll be Google's next invention.

Google Earth, via Neatorama