Celestron SkyPortal

I’ve tried to get my telescope centered using this app by aligning it to the moon’s location, and I’m being dissatisfied by the app’s performance as when I tried to aligning the telescope through the app, the lens showed a blank sky because the telescope was offset to the right of the telescope’s direction of focus. I had to literally manually align the telescope due to this. I do have a screenshot of what I am speaking of. Finding planets took me time because of a similar scenario. It would be great if the app could make improvements with aligning the iPhone so that telescope users won’t have to turn on their battery powered laser that comes with their StarSense explorer telescopes or any other telescope of this brand.

I was introduced to sky portal when I got a celestron go to telescope a short time ago and it’s become my primary astronomy app since it easy to use, contains a through library of visible objects in the night sky of the northern hemisphere and with the compass mode gives you a rough view of the sky you are looking at in real time, my only recommendations for anyone using this app would be to use it on a iPad or tablet over a smartphone as the arrow keys used to slew a telescope and the crosshairs used to target an object can be tricky to use on the smaller screen. It would be nice if there were more satellites and objects listed maybe that’s what Sky Safari Pro is for and I may upgrade one day but at the moment Sky Portal meets the means for my backyard astronomical observations. App is 4 stars

I have been using this app with my iPad Pro 12.9,” and I cannot say enough how wonderful this app is. It felt so refreshing to be using an app that wasn’t developed specifically to nickel & dime the user every second. Plus, the fact that this app is able to scale to the 12.9” Pro’s screen size correctly makes it even more enjoyable. I love the overall UI design as it is very intuitive for the most part. Yes there are plenty of both single payment and micro transaction based apps that may offer a bit more. Though when you consider that at least for now, this app is completely free, the app itself becomes quite a compelling offer. That being said, only time will tell if this remains the case in future versions of the app. Unfortunately, two things are impacting my current rating. First is the red night vision option for the UI of the app. While I do not find this UI setting bad, I would prefer if it also had a custom color option as well. If I am using the app for a long period of time at night, the red causes my eyes to feel strained. Also, the red in fact can also make it harder to see the overall UI. Perhaps a night vision like setting using a single or custom color option that allowed you to see the app information would be better than just a simple all red overlay. Second is a more pressing issue that I already see other reviews bringing up, the new unending startup crashes. Since the last update, I cannot use the app at all. I’m running iOS 11 currently, and all I see is about 10-15 seconds of launch screen before immediate crash to home screen. This needs to be fixed in the next update as the app is currently useless right now.