It must be quite a challenge to pull this off, but here’s an explanation of how it’s done. There is a working Astrometry.net bot trawling Flickr.com, where it volunteers “astro:” metadata tags to posted astronomical imagery, like this, with links on to the location in World Wide Telescope.
Now Jim over at Eat your greens! has started to play with this metadata using Yahoo Query Language (YQL), which can access Flickr.com programmatically. One example of his work: Placing a Flickr image side by side in a web browser with the same view in Google Sky (web plugin).
Here’s a primer on astrotagging, courtesy of the Royal Observatory at Greenwich, with an aside for developers.
I often find myself needing to get coordinates for various astronomical objects by name. There are several services out there to do this sort of thing already but all have different interfaces and cover specific types of astronomical objects.
I love how astrotagging makes it possible for LookUP to return images from Flickr, if there are any.
Panorama making-of: 360Cities’s Jeffrey and David Martin write a great how-to on getting panoramas online and/or into Google Earth.
Imagery Update list: Google’s complete list of regions updated during the last imagery update. Microsoft Virtual Earth also had a massive update, but as its update list shows, Microsoft continues to focus almost exclusively on the first world. I continue to want imagery of the places I haven’t been to, can’t go to, or dream of. This is also the reason why Google Earth is a global brand — because even tourist guides in Yemen want to see their 4WD parked in front of their mud-brick compound.