It's just like having the S&T Pocket Sky Atlas on your iPad or Phone. Obviously it works better on the iPad because of the far greater screen real estate, but is very good on both. App by David Widdowson of Astrovisuals (
http://www.astrovisuals.com.au/apps.html), and at AU$5.99 is top value I reckon.
This is a good app for its first iteration.
1) It's a little sticky scrolling from a currently displaying map back to the selection page as sometimes you have to scroll past a blank screen.
2) Although the white on black maps are reasonably night time friendly on the field, I'd like to see a proper red-screen mode with all titles and menu items coloured red as well.
3) Scrolling between adjacent maps doesn't really work. If I have Map 10 up for example, with the top half of Orion in my bottom left corner, and I want to scroll to the next map to see the bottom half of Orion on Map 2, a simple flick up on the current map (to move the current map upwards and on to the map below) lands me on Map 18 (Polar North). The gesture direction is reversed, which isn't intuitive. In other words you flick in the direction you want to go rather than displace the current map and bring in the new one.
Other than those little nigglies, it's a great addition to my iDevice astronomy collection that I'd use in the field. I guess that you could use iBooks or the Kindle app to store and view any of the plethora of PDF versions around the place, but with layers and various modes of presentation I think that it's worth the asking price.
Quote:
These are serious Star Charts, not a planetarium-type app suitable for beginners, but rather a very detailed series of charts of the night sky for observers using binoculars or a telescope. Prepared by famous celestial cartographer Wil Tirion, they present the entire sky in the form of 18 charts, 16 covering the equatorial region of the sky (8 each side of the celestial equator) and one for each of the Polar Regions.
Features include:
* Stars down to sixth magnitude; double and variable stars included.
* All Messier objects, plus many NGC and IC catalogue objects.
* Auto detection of your location and presentation of the chart containing the sky directly overhead.
* Choice of positive charts (white on black, recommended to preserve night vision) or negative (black on white – easier to read and better for daytime use.)
* Charts can shown north up or south up to match your location.
* Search charts by constellation or major star name.
Basic default maps show constellation names, constellation lines and major star names only.
Extra layers can be added to reveal:
* Constellations boundaries for all 88 constellations.
* Grid lines and co-ordinates for every hour of Right Ascension and 10º of Declination.
* Star numbers and deep sky object names.
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