SkyView® Lite

🤯😵‍💫🫨🤯😵‍💫🫨🤯😵‍💫🫨 I had a very long and well written positive review about this amazing free Milky Way celestial body app moments ago. Unfortunately, as I wrote my final sentence, the App Store app suddenly timed me out 😑 and sent me to the Home Screen, splattering my glorious words into oblivion. Basically this is the absolute A1, cream de la crème, king of kings, Lord of all space apps in regards to being free and providing accurately delicious information. Easy, fun and practical to use the app while educating our simple little minds simultaneously. Puts the colossal immensity of space into our palms while perfectly putting things into perspective as life’s problems shrink to grains of sand when compared to the cosmos. I wish to convey my deepest, most sincere gratitude toward SkyView’s developers as they have tremendously helped me in more ways than I would have imagined through using this app. Also the free Lite version is all I have ever needed and I commend them further for not constantly badgering me to pay for anything except for a subtle suggestion to upgrade now and then which is understandable. Thanks again for bringing the heavens into our homes. God bless everyone involved in this wonderful feat of programming 🙏🙏🙏

Unlike other people who give reviews under four stars, I’m well aware that pointing your phone down gives you an idea of what’s below you. But like other users, I’ve been having issues with calibration. I see what I know for a fact is Polaris and I point my phone at it? Nope, must be looking northwest according to the app! See the Gemini twins on the horizon and look at it through the app? Nah, Gemini’s actually to your left! I know that the settings allow you to calibrate manually, but the automatic calibration is all screwed up. I don’t want to deal with that. This app was fun to use when I first downloaded it and just wanted to know what I was looking at, but when I got a bit more serious about astronomy, using this app became more of a chore. It’s missing stars from some constellations, including Mira which is a somewhat well known star in Cetus, and this is very annoying. I have the app set up to show as many stars as possible, and it’s still missing some vital ones that are in constellation outlines. The pop up telling you to upgrade whenever you open the app is also very annoying. All in all, I’d recommend this app for people who just want to know where in the sky their favorite Zodiac constellation is. For anyone else, Stellarium Web is much better than this - it has all of the same features (constellation art and lines, planets, etc) plus all 88 Western constellations, not the 15 or so you can on this app. It will allow you to track more than two satellites and zoom in on planets, sun, and moon, all for free. Go there if you want a good experience.

Skyview by Terminal Eleven LLC is an amazing stargazing app that uses augmented reality to see stars, planets, and satellites. This app does not require wifi or a network to run except when it needs to update firmware or object trajectories. When the app is initiated a piece of soothing extraterrestrial music plays in the background as the camera is aimed in the sky. Skyview is much more than just stargazing augmented reality app because it also allows the exploration of all 88 constellations and constellations of the zodiac. Once a constellation is selected the user can select the info button which cues an enormous amount of information. Information that can be found includes abbreviation, translation, family, origin and brightest star. As the user scrolls to the bottom of the screen the constellation background is shared which includes characteristics, space explorations, and astrology. The controls of the app allow the user to adjust the visible star magnitude, increase planet size, toggle on/off the AR camera and gyroscope calibrations. Stars are not the only objects in the Skyview app it also includes satellites, the Hubble telescope, international space station, moons, planets, and sun. This application can be built into a 4th-grade science unit on the planets. Since the app does not require night time to operate students could use this app to immerse themselves in astronomy. The ease of use and user-friendly controls make an exceptional choice for instructional designers and classroom facilitators.