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Distant Suns (Lite): The new way to look at the sky

       iOS iPhone

Sporting a database of thousands of stars, nebula and galaxies, Distant Suns has earned the reputation of both having one of the most realistic displays of the night sky, while being one of the easiest to use astronomy programs available for the most casual sky watcher and serious telescope jockey alike.

Features include:

•Thousands of pinpoint stars scintillating like diamond dust in the palm of your hand (but not nearly as scratchy)
•Realistic ghostly band of the Milky Way

•All 88 constellations with articles on their mythology
•All 9 planets (yes, we feel that little Pluto got a bad rap so in the Distant Suns universe it is still a planet)
•Sun and Moon
•GPS aware
•What's Up? Gives a quick snapshot overview of where all of the important stuff is
•Easy one-handed operation.
•Point and Identify mode reveals the hidden data for each of the stars, planets and deep-sky wonders
•Up to date Planetary data
•IM the author with astronomical questions. And he may answer if he's not napping. AIM Handle: lazyastronomer. Also on twitter at distantsuns.

What do the paid versions have that this doesn't?

• Universal version so it runs on both the iPhone and iPad (Distant Suns (max) only)
• The ability to change date/time and accelerate time to study the heavenly motions
• Up to 300,000 stars, down to magnitude 10
• Mythical figures for all constellations
• The ability to fine tune the star's sizes and images from simple to stunning
• Be able to filter out dimmer stars to match your local sky
• Compass support for iPhone and iPad. Just aim the phone at the sky and see what you're looking at.
• Augmented Reality: displays the stars on top of your phones video image
• Nightvision mode keeps your eyes dark-adapted when outside at night
• Smoothly slews to each object when selected

"The most beautiful computer program anywhere! Thanks!!" comment received on Twitter

Distant Suns: The new way to look at the sky.

What's new

●Now fully iPhone 5 compliant
●Added tracking of Comet Pan-STARRS
●The toolbar buttons should be much easier to hit
●Some outstanding issues in landscape mode have been addressed
●The news ticker will now continue when coming out of background
●Restored some of the missing SETI meta-data, as the SETI archive site changed nearly everything with no warning
●Added to preferences: Hide status when hiding toolbar. This completely hides the top status bar whereas the date/look angle strip is normally visible.
●Fixed an alignment issue with the Milky-way
●Fixed a number of issues with the coloring of different elements
●Tapping on an element in Astronomy’s RSS feed will no longer launch two instances of the browser
●Changed the show-toolbar button from a ball to an up-caret: ^, as that is more easily seen and understood
●Reorganized the on-screen pick data
●And many other smaller UI changes and tweaks have been made

Screenshots

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Last changed:

Mar 05, 2013

Category:

Education

Developer:

First Light

Version:

1.6.1

Average Rating:

5.00 (34)

Size:

39.5 MB

Other Apps By This Developer

• Distant Suns(max): Unleash Your Inner Astronaut
• Distant Suns: The new way to look at the sky