Lunar Eclipse Live

It’ll be a dark and stormy night on the moon. Well, dark anyway, because tonight is the only total lunar eclipse of 2010.
Visible to people in North America starting at about 9pm Pacific this evening, the Earth will pass between the sun and moon, blocking the sun’s light from reaching the moon’s surface.
We’ve launched a live telescope feed in Google Sky, and we’ll be broadcasting the whole event so that you can keep tabs on the event regardless of the local weather conditions.
To find the feed, which we created in partnership with slooh.com, fire up Google Earth and enter Sky Mode by clicking on the Planet Icon in the toolbar and selecting Sky.
Then, open up the Current Sky Events folder and click on the blue Slooh Space Camera link to open the feed balloon.

Be sure to check back after the eclipse too and follow along as we and Slooh broadcast more live images from their telescopes.
Posted by Noel Gorelick, Chief Extraterrestrial Observer

Google Category Tool Updated

We have updated the Google Places Category Tool with a “dump” of current categories and synonyms.

From the last time we updated the data a year ago, Google deleted 170 categories and 1922 synonyms, leaving exactly 1900 primary categories in the list. Most of the deleted categories were plural duplicates of existing categories. I.E. “Surgeons” was deleted as a stand alone category and added as a synonym to the category “Surgeon”. For the compulsive amongst you here is the list of deleted categories and synonyms.

In that timeframe Google has also added only three new categories; Airport , Car Sharing Location and Electric Vehicle Charging Station. They also added 11 new synonyms; airport, international airport, international, flights, arrivals, intl, int, aeropuerto, air port, flughafen.

To search the current Google categories go to our Google Places Category Tool. To see all categories as an HTML page go here. For those of you outside of the U.S. we hope to have the other language categories added shortly.

Compatibility Issues With EMET

We have discovered compatibility issues between Google Chrome and Microsoft’s Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit (EMET). EMET is used to deploy and configure security mitigation technologies, often for legacy software. However, because Chrome already uses many of the same techniques (and more), EMET does not provide any additional protection for Chrome. In fact, the current version of EMET interferes with Chrome’s security and prevents Chrome from updating.

We are working closely with Microsoft on a solution to these issues. In the meantime, we advise users and enterprises not to attempt to configure EMET to work with Chrome.

Posted by Ian Fette, Product Manager and Carlos Pizano, Software Engineer