Turning Google Maps into Tupperware Español | Deutsch | Français | Italiano | Português

We've know this was coming for a while, but not when. News of Google Maps for Sky leaked out last week on the Google Maps API forum, quickly followed by the official Google announcement on Friday.


You can create a Sky map in the same way you did your plain old regular map, all you have to do is pass it the correct mapType. So something like this will get you a handle to a Sky Map,

     var map = new GMap2(document.getElementById("map"), 
     { mapTypes : G_SKY_MAP_TYPES });

However if you want to do anything to the map, the coordinate mapping isn't pretty. If you've got your RA and Dec in decimal degrees, you'll need to fudge them like this to push a marker pin into the sky,

     var point = new GLatLng( dec, -ra + 180 );
     var marker = new GMarker(point);
     map.addOverlay(marker);

This initially had me very confused, not only is it back-to-front, it's not what you have to do to your RA and Dec to plot it in Google Earth. There you have to subtract 180 from your RA value before throwing it into your KML file. Which of course brings me to KML support, there doesn't seem to be any right now...

The lack of KML support is a bit disappointing, it'd be nice to be able to take the KML network link that has the live feed of event messages flowing across the eSTAR network, and throw it directly into Maps. But right now that isn't possible. No worries though, this is an early release in every sense of the word. It's coming, I'm sure I can count on the Googlers.

With that in mind, it'd be daft for me to rewrite the code to throw the live events into Google Maps, because if KML support is coming, and surely it is, I'd just be wasting my effort. So I decided to sit down and PLASTIC-enable Maps instead. A few months ago I did the same for Google Earth, although obviously I had to take a slightly different tack this time around while turning Google Maps for Sky into so called "tupperware".


As before I've written a small PLASTIC application, a facade, which registers with the PLASTIC Hub as normal and listens for ivo://votech.org/sky/pointAtCoords messages. These are PLASTIC messages telling interested applications to "point at" an RA & Dec. When such a message is passed through the Hub, say by CDS Aladin, it is forwarded to the facade application, which then injects this into a boiler plate HTML file. The facade application then exposes this HTML file via an embedded web server. If you point a web browser at this end point you get a map with the marker plotted at the relevant RA & Dec.

Additionally when you send a PLASTIC message into facade application the place mark it generates has a link which, when clicked, will call back to the facade application's embedded webserver and allow you to send a PLASTIC message back to the Hub. This means there is bi-directional control, both in and out, of Google Maps with PLASTIC.

I've uploaded the source code again, but be warned, this is proof-of-concept stuff and when you're dealing with Perl that can get pretty torturous. Especially since I based it on the previous proof-of-concept code I wrote for Google Earth and never got round to fixing up.

There are obvious problems with my implementation, after all it was just a wet Sunday afternoon's work, but most of these are fixable with a little refactoring. However it does work, and uses a lot of the same concepts as my previous effort. This hints strongly that it really is time I got round to writing that general use PLASTIC module for Perl that I've been talking about for a year or more...

Update: More Google Maps for Sky, this time on the iPod touch.