SkySafari 4 Plus: Stargazing
SkySafari 4 Plus is everything in SkySafari 4, plus more. It adds a hugely expanded database, wired or wireless telescope control, and spaceflight. Take stargazing to the next level!
This version includes 2.5 million stars, 31,000 deep sky objects, the Solar System's major planets and moons, over 4,000 updatable asteroids, comets, and satellites. Simulate the sky from any place in the Solar System, up to 10,000 years in the past or future. Expand your astronomical knowledge with over 1500 encyclopedic descriptions of the constellations, stars, and planets. Enjoy more than 800 images from NASA space missions, the Hubble Space Telescope, and the world's foremost astro-photographers.
Leave Earth's surface behind with SkySafari 4 Plus! Tap the Orbit button to fly into orbit around other objects in the Solar System and beyond. Follow eclipses, occultations, and transits in Earth's sky! View the planets and their moons as only NASA space probes have
- even label every crater on them.
SkySafari 4 Plus adds wired or wireless control for Celestron, Meade, Orion, SkyWatcher, and many other computerized telescopes. It can point your GoTo or "Push-To" telescope anywhere in the sky, using your device's built-in Bluetooth, and a Bluetooth serial adapter (sold separately). Plan observing sessions with Observing Lists, log your observations into them, and share them with friends. More astronomers use SkySafari for telescope control than any other app!
Plus is a powerful planetarium that fits in your pocket. It puts millions of stars and all the planets at your fingertips and contains encyclopedic descriptions of the constellations, stars and planets. It lets you find objects in the sky using your device's built-in compass and accelerometer. Use the interactive star chart from anywhere on the globe! No need to walk away from the city lights
- the star chart shows you all of the stars and planets at their exact spots. Connect your telescope to it and bring the distant worlds even closer.
There's even more in SkySafari 4 Pro
- but Plus will keep anyone with a small backyard telescope busy for years.
Here's what's new in version 4:
* Complete rewrite of compass code for much smoother and more accurate motion tracking.
* Google Maps integration: choose your location from a built-in Maps view.
* Animated meteor showers, with complete viewing information and spectacular graphics.
* New horizon panoramas: Yerba Buena Gardens in downtown San Francisco, Uluru (Ayers Rock) Australia, and the top of Mauna Kea on Hawaii's Big Island. Or add your own!
* New and updated descriptions for hundreds of objects.
* Completely reinvented scope control panel.
* Objects lists under Search are now sortable by name, number, magnitude, RA, Dec, and many other properties.
* New Advanced Search options let you find objects using properties other than their name. For example, you can find all objects of a certain type, within a certain constellation, brighter than a certain magnitude, etc.
* New Advanced Time settings let you enter a date & time thousands of years in the past or future, to the nearest second, or using Julian dates
* New Telescope Equipment settings let you enter a list of all your telescope equipment. Select different combinations of eyepieces and telescopes to display field-of-view automatically. Set up a separate camera and auto-guider FOV. All FOV indicators can be labelled in the sky chart.
* Now log observations of objects directly from the Object Info view, or show all your observations of any object at once.
* New Variable Stars list, containing the brightest and best-known variables in the sky.
* Added descriptions for dozens of asteroids, comets, and satellites; and many images.
* Dozens more tweaks, bug fixes, and additions!
Category : Education
Reviews (26)
I am having trouble with the landscape settings. I don't know if it's the app or the phone. However the position of the stars are great.
Does everything I want , easy to manage , stores all my observing sites and keeps equipment parameters . Limited data on southern hemisphere meteor showers .
Very accurate I use it for UFO hunting that way I know what I'm looking at.
Won't update. Will have to buy again if you want the last version.
great app. Love it!!!
I've had some niggles with force closes and some setup issues. But one those were sorted I've been really impressed. Its got so much detail and useful features. I love being able to adjust the magnitude of the stars and dsos, using this to adjust to seeing conditions and scope aperture is really helpful. Still thinking if I should have got the pro version, now I have this great app I really think I would the extra stuff would have been worth it.
Great for trying to find objects in the night sky. Especially good because you can have it display things upside down: how they appear in a lot of telescopes. The pictures are marvelous, but there are a lot of things that are listed , but have no picture. Either way, it's really great. Now, if only the weather was the same.
Saw it for half price and couldn't resist. Only been playing with it for a few days but already love it! Really like being able to make observation notes about when I observed something and the conditions. I like that when I make an observation note it shows the object as checked it the catalogue. All the issues I had initially are resolvable by settings (was more familiar with different constellation lines for example).
It's nearly a year since my last review, & nothing's changed! I love this app. It has so many good features. The only thing that stops me giving it a 5 is that I still can't get rid of the toolbar on landscape mode. It takes up too much of the screen. Correct this as on the iPhone version & it definitely gets a 5+!
Decided to try the paid for version to see if it would work better than the one supplied with my celestron scope, but it is still terrible. The controls for alignment are unresponsive and stick on so you end up spending most of your evening trying to aim at stars for alignment like some sort of video game. I haven't managed to get it to align yey so can't comment much on the rest of the app except to say that compass mode also seems very poor.
Used to be able to use the compass or gyro for free. I just paid $14.00 for this app because the free version won't allow compass use. Neither does this. What use is the app if you can't hold the divine up to the sky and have it tell you what it is your seeing,
I often use the program to show the public items we often have a have time seeing in city lights. It also helps me get close for my alignment procedure of my telescope mount. The best is using it as a push to setup. Looking forward to using with a Nexus DSC setup.
One of the best apps I have, so easy to use and very accurate. So tempted to buy pro, just an amateur, maybe next payday. Keep up the great work because you make a lot of other apps mundane and outdated.
I meandered through several free apps like this, including Google sky, celestron sky portal, etc. And none of them were as intuitive, comprehensive, and just a sheer pleasure to use as sky safari. I find myself sitting up at night scanning objects and reading about them for hours on end, not to mention the orbit function is a neat way to feel like you are travelling around the galaxy! Fantastic app
Great app but very bad payment plan. I had to pay again to use latest version on my S6 because they stopped support for Skysafari Plus. Greedy very Greedy. Very poor show sky safari.
As a keen amateur astronomer of +30 years, I cannot recommend SkySafari gladly enough to other equally-keen stargazers. Other apps either lack its extensive star catalogue, or have inadequate interfaces; therefore making SS Plus/Pro (the latter probably too much for most backyard astronomers whose observing is limited more to LP levels than their scopes' aperture) the only money they'll have to spend on this kind of app for many years to come. If there's only one nag, is that Skyportal, a free app w/ the same catalog as SS's cheap version, offers nice voice-over reads of many objects' description. SS strangely does not! But that's no biggy, really!
I am very please with sky safari 4 plus, So far everything is behaving normally. Thank You Bob Anderson Paisley
This app reminds me of Skyportal from Celestron not worth the $15 has some of the same features Skyportal has and it's free.
Being a physics major it helps to see things that other students are reading about from my engineering classes. My astronomy professor also recommend it as well.
Looks great, works well, love it! One nitpick though, Pluto's texture is upside-down. The imaged pole should be sunlit at perihelion, since that is the side imaged by New Horizons. Other than that, no problems whatsoever.
I've always loved this app. But I have now bought a Samsung S7 and the app simply doesn't work. Info only says everything is the sun, it won't recognise my position and if I try to access the settings it simply crashes. Please fix this.
Had this on my Galaxy S4 running 5.0.1 no issues. On my new S5 Neo running Android 6.0.1, crashes EVERY TIME I tap settings
Every time I click settings it crashes. Have removed/reinstalled, doesn't fix the issue. Suspecting it's an Android OS 6.0 problem. Not paying for the next version just so I get a working copy of it again, will just use my old phone.
Pretty happy with this app overall.out crashes of I have too many options displayed. Pretty solid otherwise. Great database and simple enough that my kids can use it on their own.
So far this is the best I've tried so far. When I don't want to turn on the laptop this is what I use. Simple to use and feature laden.
Absolutely awesome app. I use it occasionally over the last 4 or 5 years. It's great for occasions when you or someone says something about a star and you can point your phone and say with some authority what it is.