I can hardly forget those days of drudgery back in school when we as students were forcibly made to memorize things about our universal system from what was written in the textbooks without any practical experience of the same. But, now the times have changed and technology has advanced many folds in the last decade – especially the rise of multimedia phones or what we call them, the Smartphones. Today, the humongous amount of interesting applications supported by the mobile devices can surely infuse some excitement in the otherwise monotonous life. One such app is SkyMap For Windows Phone 7.
Just as the name suggests, SkyMap provides interactive sky maps for any time, viewpoint and location on Earth. It shows the different names, coordinates, magnitude, astronomical rise and set times plus additional information for over 110000 stars(way more than what we can see with the naked eye or even through a lot of binoculars), messier objects, planets, sun and the moon.
The app will benefit both the casual stargazers and amateur astronomers to explore and locate the objects in the sky. Also, it can serve better as an educational software to learn the constellations and objects in the sky, to follow the movements of planets and other sky objects during the time (day or night), to find out the position of sun, planets and stars at specific moments of time between 1900 and 2100 (for example when you were born – these things are of utmost importance in India).
SkyMap App Features :
- interactive zoom : dimmer stars are displayed based on the zoom level
- night mode : preserves the eye adaptation to dark during stargazing sessions
- gesture support : drag the sky map, pinch or double tap to zoom, tap to get sky object information, etc
- telrad circles
- constellations, stars, deep space objects, planets, sun and moon informations
- autocomplete search function
- fast star data loading and initialization
- various map customizations and settings
- map animations
- map support for portrait and landscape orientations
Users can download a trial version of the app, though it comes with ads, and it also limits a few settings. The full version of the software would unlock all settings and will remove the ads.
The development team also states that some future application upgrades(such as more stars, improved graphics, point the phone to the sky) are already lined up and would be delivered at no additional cost to those who buy the software now.
You must log in to post a comment.