Best iPhone App I’ve Seen So Far
It’s called Star Walk, and it takes advantage of the possibilities of the iPhone interface in an extremely slick and compelling way. Now, given you have to have the most recent iPhone 3GS in order to experience the really whiz-bang feature. But if you do, and you’re at all into astronomy, this will kind of blow your mind. Hold your phone up as if you were looking through it at the sky, and when you tilt it beyond 90 degrees the thing orients itself to display exactly the portion of the sky perpendicular to it. Move it around and the display changes accordingly, highlighting the celestial features toward the center of the screen.
Another awesome feature of this app is something I had already seen and appreciated in the desktop application Stellarium. In the image above for instance, I have popped out the time menu, which allows you to move forward or backward in time. So if you flick your finger from bottom to top along that strip on the right, you would see the sun set below the red horizon line. And see that there may be a chance of seeing Saturn just above the horizon a couple hours after sunset. Or, another cool demonstration is to find Polaris, “the north star”, and advance time so that you see all the other stars rotate around it, while it remains almost perfectly fixed in the north.
