Various applications are designed to give users a good perspective of outer space. NASA’s deep space images make beautiful wallpapers, while Sky Map’s mobile planetarium app lets users track objects using smartphones.
SkEye for Mobile is a full-featured planetarium with an impressive catalog of stellar objects. Meanwhile, Pocket Universe provides an all-in-one observing app explicitly designed to run on iOS and Android devices.
Sky Map
Sky Map from Google is one of the most widely downloaded augmented reality star observation applications, with over 10 million downloads worldwide. It allows users to calibrate their mobile device’s compass and then use its screen to display an augmented-reality view of the night sky, enabling users to identify stars and planets as they point their device at them.
This app’s catalog boasts over 600,000 stars and can be explored using real-time zoom functions that work with galaxies and nebulae. Constellations appear in high definition, while main planets and their moons appear as 3D objects. Available on iOS and Android devices and now compatible with Apple Watch support, the application serves as an accessible celestial map.
Sky Safari (Android) provides an expansive online database of celestial objects and a time machine mode, enabling you to see past or future night skies. Furthermore, this stellar map app supports optical telescopes via connectivity and numerous alignment calibration options.
