Here’s why Google Sky is going to change astronomy as we know it: Because an astronomer like Alasdair Allan can spend an afternoon converting an astronomical events feed into KML, and suddenly millions of Google Earth clients can spatially visualize these.

His events feed project, VOEvent, has its home page here, whence you can now get a live KML network link for Google Sky.

Alasdair, writing on his blog The Daily Ack, also points us in the direction of Caltech’s VOEventNet project page which collects real-time feeds of astronomical events (such as his own) of gravitational microlensing, gamma-ray bursts and x-ray bursts — as of today, all these events are also available as KML network links. For example:

Suddenly, the sky has turned into a huge canvas, ready to be updated in real time via KML.

(Alasdair has more insights in this comment to the previous post on Ogle Earth.)