Google is known for making cool stuff and this is no exception. This application turns your phone into a planetarium as you angle the phone up to the sky. It will show constellations, named stars, planets and much more.

On the Market here.

As you start up the application you get a grid with the sky map shown, you can move the phone around and it will closely align to the real star map over your head, or even beneath your feet if you aim down at the ground. It really provides a complete view into the sky that we have never had before.

The application will label stars, constellations, planets and any other points of interest in the night sky. As you move the screen or even start positioning into landscape mode the screen adjusts nicely to match your movement. We found that the screen moved pretty good across the sky however it looked like the images of the stars might be off by a few degrees. Which is acceptable considering how few of us really get to see the full night sky with all of the stars in it due to city living.

I found it very cool to be able to see the horizon line and also to be able to look at what the opposite side of the world is seeing in the sky or even what would be visible if the day suddenly turned to night.

The above screen shot is down on 'night mode' so that you can still see behind the phone without too much light pollution.

These are some of the settings that you can turn on/off to effect your view of the sky.

You can even search the sky for anything that you want to look for to find where something is when you cannot see it.

Once you have performed the search the application will guide you towards the object in the sky.

Conclusions

This is a very well done program and Google thought about just about everything. They took search, augmented reality and a love for astronomy and combined it into a single application that is very nicely done. This is a good show off application and really displays what is possible on the Android system for augmented reality. Beyond that it is fun to play around with if you have a nice clear night sky and want to start to learn about the constellations which held such importance to early man that they were all named and had stories around them.

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