Description
The ideal stargazing companion. Easily find constellations, planets or shooting stars zones. A complete hand planetarium for beginners and advanced astronomers.
With the new iPhone 3GS compass, Starmap displays exactly the portion of the sky you are pointing at. Hold the device parallel to your line of vision and discover the map smoothly scanning the sky as you move.
Starmap is a powerful sky navigation tool, written by a professional astronomer. It's design avoids gadget ornaments on purpose but is aimed at helping real observation.
A full video of Starmap's features is available on the support website. Do not hesitate to contact the author before purchasing Starmap.
IMPORTANT: take a look at STARMAP PRO, with NGC/IC catalogues, eyepiece view and more functions dedicated to astronomers.
FEATURES:
- 350 000 visible stars (SAO up to magnitude 10).
- 200 Main stars with names, kind, spectrum.
- 150 Galaxies and nebulae (Messier catalog, main NGC/IC).
- Deep sky objects images.
- Tonight''s bests selection.
- Time slider.
- Lunar calendar.
- Constellations boundaries.
- Automatic viewpoint using the built-in accelerometer.
- Pinch and zoom as if you were looking in a telescope.
- More and more details when zooming.
- Finder arrow for localizing objects.
- Smooth and antialiased graphics.
- Adjust sky and stars brightness matching your observation conditions.
- Full coordinates, ecliptic, celestial equator.
- Complete ephemeris, including moon phase and planets satellites views.
- Touching map items brings up info panel.
- Night Vision mode
- Shooting star zones
- GPS support
- Custom user locations
(The Swedish version has menus in English. Full localization is still pending.)
What's New in Version 1.4
• Compass support for iPhone 3GS.
• The sleep mode can be disabled.
• The landscape mode can be disabled.
Issues corrected:
• Transit time are too imprecise and can vary by one hour.
• Moon ephemeris precision is increased.
• An issue occuring when the maximum displayed magnitude was negative or null.
Customer Reviews
Beautiful and versatile but not the only option
Of the four star-chart apps currently available, Starmap has the most features and can produce the most aesthetically pleasing images.
Starmap's database includes stars all the way down to magnitude 10--about what you can see in good binoculars from a dark site--plus the planets and 150 deep-sky objects. It can show names and colors of the brighter stars, constellation lines (but not boundaries), azimuthal and/or equatorial grids, and an outline of the Milky Way. You can easily adjust the brightness of the stars and the brightness/color of the background sky. A setting allows you to view or hide the sky below your current horizon. Starmap even shows little photographs of planets and most deep-sky objects, though their sizes are exaggerated.
A separate ephemeris page provides lots of data on the planets, even showing the current positions of their major satellites. Oddly, there's no similar data (coordinates, magnitudes, rise/set times) available for stars or deep-sky objects. The program would be much improved if you could simply tap on any object to get quantitative information about it, as in iAstronomica or Uranus. Experienced users should definitely consider Uranus, since it also includes more deep-sky objects.
The user interface implements the usual pinch, spread, and drag gestures, but as others have pointed out, the animation is pretty sluggish. If a responsive interface is important to you, consider GoSkyWatch or perhaps iAstronomica. The delayed response is aggravated by the way zooming causes stars and gridlines to appear, disappear, or change in brightness. Zooming in often leaves me disoriented, even though I know the sky pretty well. I find myself constantly adjusting the brightness settings to produce realistic images. Another minor annoyance is that some gridlines are incorrectly labeled.
My biggest complaint, though, is that you can't zoom out far enough. Unlike iAstronomica and GoSkyWatch, Starmap won't show the whole sky at once; the maximum field is about 70 degrees across. The minimum field is acceptable, about 5 degrees. I also wish Starmap could animate the passage of time--something that's very easy in iAstronomica.
Starmap is a great app, and I'm sure it will improve over time. Just remember that it's not the only astronomy app out there, and the others all have their advantages.
This is the app I've been waiting for! (Well, one of them ... )
For many years I used the Star Pilot suite on my Palm OS handhelds before I switched to iPhone, and I was hoping that the advent of the App Store would bring me a replacement for that. Starmap is that, and more! At present there appear to be four star chart applications available here: Starmap, iAstronomica, Uranus, and GoSkyWatch. Starmap has by far the most detailed and informative website, and it seems to have more features than the other apps, too (I haven't played with them). In addition to the basic map, it can lead you to a selected object with arrows pointing which way to look in the sky. With an iPhone 3G, it uses GPS and the accelerometer to change the sky view to show what you're looking at as you turn (azimuth) and look up and down (elevation); on my original iPhone you must change azimuth manually in the view, though the accelerometer will change elevation for you if you turn it on in the prefs (by default it's off, and you have to move the view manually). Starmap also has a built-in "flashlight" with white or red light at variable brightness, saving you the trouble of switching to one of the free-or-cheap flashlight apps out there (as long as you don't want blue light, say). Stars to 10th magnitude are included (same as some of the competitors, more than others), which is useful if you zoom in to find a dim planet or deep-sky object as you would in a telescope, and they turn on and off automatically as you zoom in and out, so a wide-angle view doesn't get too crowded. You'll also find all the ephemeris information (location and rise/set times for planets, Sun and Moon) that you'd expect, though I'd have liked to see a numerical indication of moon phase under the image ("20%", "6 days after new", or something like that) instead of just a label ("Waxing Crescent").
The most impressive feature for me, though, as a telescope user, is a display of the positions of planetary moons relative to their planet for Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Mars! (You'll need a pretty monstrous telescope to go looking for Mars' moons, though.) This was included in the Star Pilot suite for Jupiter and Saturn, and since I switched I have missed the ability to tell which dot in my eyepiece was which moon (and which were background stars) without studying a chart in a magazine in the dark. I really didn't expect to find this specialized capability available in the App Store at launch, let alone for less than I paid for Star Pilot to run on the inferior graphics of my Palm handhelds! And there is plenty more -- as I said, check out the website for lots of details.
The developer maintains on the website a list of features planned for the next release of Starmap; some things currently missing but forthcoming include a night-vision mode for the map and interface, and zoom capability in the planetary-moons views (at least for Saturn -- it's hard to see where Mimas, Tethys, and Enceladus are when the view around Saturn is large enough to show Iapetus). Other reviewers have complained about the speed with which the screen updates as you pan, but compared to the speed of Star Pilot on any Palm device I could afford, it's just fine for me. Other things I would like to see changed, though, include the names of the constellations, which are given in English instead of the more familiar (believe it or not) traditional Latin names -- Swan instead of Cygnus, Balance instead of Libra, etc. I also found it annoying that only the main sky display was implemented in landscape mode; presumably because of the details of how the iPhone SDK works, this means that if you are in any other display, say an ephemeris or a prefs screen, and you turn from portrait to landscape mode, then you are dumped back into the sky display. (Okay, so don't rotate your iPhone out of portrait mode -- but sometimes it tilts itself if I set it down a little crooked.) Finally, the one thing that I expected to see that isn't there is an all-sky display, so you can see at a glance what's above the horizon at any given time! This is the main use I made of Star Pilot, but in Starmap the most you can zoom out is the scale where the long dimension runs about halfway from the horizon to the zenith. Well, if the developer doesn't add this, I can always drop an Alexander on iAstronomica.
Multiple star charts & desktop computer in your pocket
I’ve got star charts for the Northern and Southern hemispheres, but they are peanuts to Starmap. One, they don’t fit in my pocket. Two, they’ve got to be swiveled around in multiple places to the correct time, and if you drop one, you’ve got to do it all over again in the dark. Three, they don’t illuminate, so you also have to carry a flashlight. I’ve also got a computer application that does what Starmap does, but again, it’s a bit difficult to fit my Windows XP tower (no Mac version!), monitor, keyboard, mouse, and power source in my pocket.
Starmap is many charts in one, since you can orient it to just about any location on the planet. It comes with its own adjustable-brightness flashlight, a “Lamp” button, which you can set to illuminate in red to preserve your night vision. Its interface is drop dead easy to use and includes the ability to turn planets, deep field objects, and constellation outlines on and off. Touchscreen panning and zooming around the sky is a bit slow, but it’s easy and fast to use the cardinal directions buttons instead. You can also search its catalogue to find objects of interest and figure out whether they’re visible and where to look for them in the night sky. I haven’t begun to list all the cool features of Starmap. It’s the only app I’ve paid for, and it’s well worth every penny.
- Category: Education
- Updated Jul 18, 2009
- Current Version: 1.4
- 16.4 MB
- Languages: English, Danish, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Spanish, Swedish
- Seller: Frederic Descamps
- © 2008 Frederic Descamps
Requirements: Compatible with iPhone and iPod touch. Requires iPhone OS 3.0 or later.
