There’s a inexplicable lack of astronomy applications for the Mac platform. Sure there’s The Sky and Starry Night but the real serious amateur astronomers I know all carry netbooks with them to their observing sessions.
You would think that with the Mac’s better graphics, that amateur astronomers would flock to the platform but sadly aside from a few advanced applications like Nebulosity and AstroPlanner, most software is designed to run only on Wintel machines. So I thought I would start a series of reviews of applications for the Mac OSX and iOS platforms, starting with some of the tools I use on my iPhone.
Sky Safari and Starmap - Both fantastic and fun to play with planetarium applications with loads of bells and whistles What to know what time Saturn will rise or if M42 is visible tonight? Both can help you out in that department. Both take advantage of the iPhone’s location aware services and motion detector so you can hold your iPhone up to the night sky and see a map of what you are looking of. Sky Safari will also show you what’s below the horizon.
NASA - The official source for anything you want to know about any current NASA mission. Also streams NASA TV. You can also see the next ISS flyover for your area.
flyby - Speaking of ISS flyovers, flyby uses data from Spaceweather.com and lists the next flyover for your location for a whole host of satellites and the ISS. It’s easy to use and will even countdown the time to the next flyover.
iCSC - Invaluable as you are getting ready to head out the door for an observing session, iCSC downloads the latest Clear Sky Chart for your observing site.
So what’s on your smartphone?




