Sky Guide

Sky Guide is an astronomy app for sophisticated star enthusiasts and hobby astronomers who value well-founded and precise astronomical illustrations and data. The basic app function displays a detailed, scalable and fully user-configurable celestial map with constellations and celestial objects (limit magnitude up to 6.3) that are visible with the naked eye or smaller telescopes. The place and time of observation as well as the direction of view can be manually configured by the user or automatically with the so-called “Live mode” (i.e. GPS, real-time and compass-guided). Detailed additional information is available for every celestial object (fixed star, deep sky object, planet, moon, sun, meteorite shower). The information of the Bright Star Catalog and the Washington Double Star Catalog is made available for fixed stars. Additionally, users can add notes and links for every object. The powerful search function makes it possible to align the map to a specific celestial object or guide the observer – in „live mode“ – to an object in the starry sky with specific notices. Searches can be performed according to the traditional name of an object, the catalog designation or the constellation. Moreover, the app makes it easy to identify celestial objects by aligning the device to the object in “Live mode”. The functionality of the app is complemented by a number of astronomical tools and data, e.g. an astronomical event calculator, an orbit diagram (orrery), a moon viewer (a scalable, orthogonal, geocentric or topocentric moon projection while properly taking the libration, moon phase, position angle and parallactic angle into account) and an ephemerides generator.