Are you fond of looking at the starlit sky? Do you like to see spectacles like planetary sightings, or just plain shooting stars? You no longer need to go to the nearest telescope.
In fact, you don’t even need to look up. Just look down, at your Nokia smartphone. Nokia has a couple of star gazing apps for all you astronomers out there. The apps utilize your smartphone’s GPS along with a compass to track down stars and planets in a way that has never been done before.
The app called Skymap which is available for a price of £1.29 for Nokia Lumia 800 and Lumia 710 and £3 for Symbian devices. What you need to do is switch on the app, point at the sky and adjust the compass, the app does the rest. And then your phone also turns into a viewfinder. As you move your phone in the direction of the sky, you get the detail of all stars, constellations and planets. Moreover, it will also display detailed information on everything you click on.
But that’s not all; Nokia’s site even displays how you could use your phone to take the photos of stars if you attach it to a high-grade telescope as displayed by Michael from thisisyourlife on Nokia’s site. In fact, they have posted a video of the surface of the moon, which is I must admit, quite splendid to look at.
Looking at the app, even though I am not the typical geek who is into astronomy, the concept managed to get me hooked. One generally expects a phone to be endowed with a camera, internet and maybe some games, but telescopic qualities are something one can hardly even dream of.
The extent to which this is possible and how successful it is for amateurs like us still needs to assessed though. Wait for our full app review before you buy it.