Stargazing Apps

Planets, Distant Suns, and Angle nicely compliment one another to assist in amateur stargazing.

The other night, I was out in a relatively cloud-free area looking upwards, and wondered which stars were which. I started out with the app Planets, which gives a nice view of what should be in the sky. It has markings to help determine azimuth and elevation. Notice that East and West are flipped. When you hold the phone face-down, it flips them for you so when you look up, everything lines up properly. At the time I was using it, the moon was in the sky, so I was able to use the app to find North and orient myself to be able to use Distant Suns. Planets does a couple of other cool things as well: it shows the Sun's illumination of the Earth and it shows the times of the rise and fall of the major celestial bodies.

Distant Suns (I used the Lite version) is a more advanced starfinding tool. The display is a bit more busy, but it gives a lot more information. I turned off a lot of the features so all I was shown were the stars and planets and constellation names. Using Angle find a star's elevation and estimating azimuth (I figured out which tree was closest to north and guessed from there) I was able to find three bright stars that lined up. Finding those stars enabled me to find other stars around them, and so on. I used Distant Suns (which was originally released in '89, according to the authors) to identify stars, constellations, planets, and so on. It was a very cool night. The app has a lot more functionality, but without a telescope in the middle of a brightish city, most of it was lost on me.

Angle is a very simple app that measures the angle between the left edge of the iPhone and the ground. Held right, if you sight along the right edge you can measure the elevation of a star. It's a simple app that does one thing well. The feature that makes it work is tapping the dial locks the display. Sight, tap, read. No need to hold it steady to get a good reading.

I highly recommend anybody who lives in an area where stars are visible (I'm in the middle of a big city and I could see them) to download and use these three apps. They're all bug-free (as far as I could tell) and fairly easy to use. Distant Suns took a bit of messing around with to get the hang of it, but it uses the typical iPhone-style controls: pinch, drag, &c.

All apps get two thumbs up: one for concept and one for execution. If you get the chance, download these three apps and head out at night to look at the stars.