SkySafari 7 Plus

Would not recommend this app. After years of having the SkySafari Pro, and it’s constant prompts for me to upgrade, I finally decided to upgrade to the sky safari plus. I spent two hours trying to enter my preferences in my information into the settings, I prompted into settings to show planets and it did. Now they’re gone even though the setting still indicates that they’re showing. It took the better part of an hour to try to figure out how to get the time to be correct to my current time. I finally found the setting that it thought I was for some reason in England. Once I got that changed, it finally set it up to my local time. But the sky did not adjust. I was sitting there, looking at Orion about 30° above the horizon, but the app was showing me it was about 10° below the horizon. All of the planets have disappeared from the view. And I turned off the marketing settings and yet every time I open the app it’s trying to get me to upgrade to the premium version. Do not recommend this app and if things don’t get better, I’m possibly going to delete it.

The app met my desires to at least replace the defunct SkyWeek Plus from Sky & Telescope. I wanted an app that showed the sky for a given date and time. Further, I wanted to see the stars below the horizon as well. Further, I was delighted to add the display of the equator, the ecliptic, and the galactic equator. I was further delighted to see the plot of the planet Neptune, which SkyWeek lacked. I was happy that the display was adjustable to my latitude and longitude instead of SkyWeek’s hard-coded +40 degrees latitude, 90 degrees west. What I really was looking for was very specific: a planetarium ephemeris. I have only had the app installed for about an hour, so I have a lot more to learn!

The new interface takes some getting used to, but once I figured out where everything was I definitely think it's an improvement. It makes logging and planning my observing sessions much easier. I love the events section. Enormously useful for planning. I do have a couple of minor complaints. The apparent lack of ability to automatically import observation records from SS6 is leading to a lot of work to restore progress on observing lists by carefully relogging them out of my notebooks. Also I like the new notification options, but you REALLY need a way to restrict notifications to things that are above the horizon from your current location. I don't want to get notifications of shadow transits on Jupiter when Jupiter is below my current horizon. It would be really nice to be able to restrict notifications to phenomena one can actually OBSERVE. Note for anyone struggling with the decision between plus and pro; On SS4 And SS5, I went with the pro version but starting with 6 I realized plus is a better fit for me. I use SkySafari in the field as a star atlas, and Plus is just a more practical field Atlas than the pro version. It goes just a hair deeper than Uranometria 2000, which is all I'll likely ever need. SSPro is a great desk reference, but unless you own a HUGE dobsonian, it's actually a little impractical in the field.