Pocket Universe [ iPhone ]

There is something about the tremendous size and scope of our observable universe that is inspiring and humbling at the same time. It's why I get excited about the variety of astronomy programs for the iPhone.

The latest is called Pocket Universe [App Store link]. For the $2.99US price, your iPhone or iPod touch gets a star atlas of 10,000 objects, a guide to moon phases, a list of what's up on any particular night including meteor showers and any visible planets, as well as live links to astronomy news.

The app also includes an accurate rendering of the positions of the 4 easily visible moons of Jupiter, but your best bet in seeing a planet this time of year is Saturn which is high in the southeast.

As we move toward summer, more and more people will be heading outdoors. That makes it it is a great time to learn the constellations and be able to understand what you are looking at, as opposed to just wondering what that bright thing is.

A nice feature of the app is auto tilt, so when you are pointing the right direction, you can tilt the phone up to get a view higher in the sky and the star map will follow your tilt. If, as rumored, the iPhone adds some kind of direction finding compass, apps like this can be even more helpful as you turn and tilt, as the map should track your movements exactly.

Pocket Universe has a very clever locate feature, where you can select an object, and there are on-screen directions to take you to the object by superimposing arrows on the screen. This feature didn't always work perfectly. I asked the program to find Saturn. It told me to follow the arrows, but no arrows appeared. It seemed to work fine on other objects I was looking for, and Saturn was properly placed on the sky map.

Walking with the stars

The popular astronomy application Star Walk [App Store link] $4.99 US, has been updated with some new features. You can now see meteor showers on screen, as well as connect to Wikipedia for more information on objects you have selected on the detailed star map.

Star Walk is probably the prettiest of the astronomy guides available for the iPhone and iPod touch. It nicely renders the dense clouds of the Milky Way, and has good visual details of the planets. It also has photos of the Messier objects, which are galaxies, star clusters and nebula.

Star Walk is location aware, so it can match what you see in the sky to what is on screen using the GPS, or you can select from 10,000 cities. You can change your location to anywhere on earth, and manipulate time to look forward and backwards. You could see what the skies were like on your birthday, or even what they looked like centuries ago or centuries ahead.

Things that could be improved would be on screen buttons that take you to the N, S, E, and W skies. The way things work now, you have to drag the map around. When you look up a Wikipedia item, it throws you out of the program. It would be better to build in a web-kit browser so you don't have to launch Star Walk again.

The app has no built in documentation. The company web site has a short PDF with more information. Although the skies in Star Walk are beautiful, most of the skies we see in real life are not. It would be nice to be able to dim the faint stars down to more accurately mimic what we see in the real world.

Nature lovers and amateur astronomers will like this program. Some of the other options at the app store include Distant Suns, [link] at $5.99 US which I have reviewed previously, and Starmap [link] $11.99 US.