Astronomy has always had a delicious appeal to me. If you love the Greek Myths and/or  that feeling of absolute, crushing,  personal insignificance under the weight of an infinite Universe, then the double joy of looking up and finding constellations is pretty hard to beat.

The only thing is, the practice has always been a bit more complicated than the theory. As a schoolboy growing up in North London,  I had a loft room,  a small pocket telescope and a copy of the trusty I-Spy in the Night Sky (how great those I Spy books were). But a combination of  horrible orange street lights, a lack of patience and what I remember as the constant cloudy nights of my youth meant I never really tied up the bears and archers on the page with the faint, blurry lights in the sky.

A couple of years ago, I got myself a Patrick Moore astronomy book. A perfect camping book, I thought. It’s great for what it is, but trying to translate the static charts into what you might see in the sky at a particular time in a particular place is a bit complicated for someone who can only just about hold an OS map the right way up.

So before going on holiday last week I wondered, inevitably, if there was an app for that, and I found Star Walk. And it’s amazing.

Let it use your location and it’ll show you your exact night sky in real time. If you’ve got the iphone 3GS, it will show you your view as you move and tilt it, but even without the 3GS it’s easy enough to scroll around the sky (assuming you know which direction your facing). It’s all but Augmented Reality, the difference being it can confidently render what you’re looking at rather than show it to you through the camera.

Within seconds of pointing it at the Dorset sky, I’d traced across the sky from  Cassiopeia to Perseus to Andromeda to Pegasus, with constellations coming into visual context on screen as they came into view. It was truly exhilarating. For the first time in my life I could read the stars.

Everything about it is beautifully conceived, like the ‘night mode’ which turns everything red so you don’t lose your night vision.

I won’t go on about all the features – they’re all on the app page – but if you’re in any way intrigued by the night sky, I really, really recommend it.

Tags   astronomy · augmented reality · iphoneNo Comments