There’s nothing better than gazing up at the stars on a night out. For $3, Pocket Universe: Virtual Sky Astronomy, using sorta-augmented reality, lets the astronomically impaired among us impress our dates.
The app uses the iPhone’s accelerometer, compass and level — just not the camera (which means it works on an iPod Touch too) — to superimpose a starmap over an illustrated backdrop of the sky. Move the iPhone slowly in any direction, and the screen displays what you should be looking at. Sometimes it works smoothly, sometimes the screen takes a while to respond; moving more slowly seems to help. This mode is also searchable, making it easy to find, say, the North Star.
But besides the above-mentioned planetarium mode, the app is packed with other tools. There’s a detailed, emailable “Tonight’s Sky” page that tells you what you might see — without which we would have missed an amazing fireball during the recent Leonid shower; a moon-phases calendar; an astronomical-events news feed, a diagram of the planet’s current positions, and more.
All this presented in a theme that looks vaguely Star Trek: The Next Generation. There are a bunch of virtual-planetarium type apps out, but this certainly one of the prettiest and easiest to use. And at thee bucks, it’s a steal.
