# Skycatching — Collect the real night sky

> Collect the real night sky (iPhone/iPad app by Matej Blinka.)

- Source: https://appshunter.io/ios/app/skycatching/id6808668776 (this page in markdown: same URL + `.md`)
- Developer: [Matej Blinka](https://appshunter.io/developer/1886509387)
- Category: Education, Reference
- Price: Free
- Age rating: 4+
- Requires: iOS 17.0 · 8 MB
- Languages: American English, Czech
- Released: 2026-09-09
- Data updated: 2026-09-11
- User reviews in markdown: https://appshunter.io/ios/app/skycatching/id6808668776/reviews.md

## What is Skycatching?

The sky in this app is the sky above you right now computed from a
catalogue of 119,625 stars, the planetary ephemeris, the date and where
you are standing. Not a photograph, not a camera trick. Point the phone
at the ceiling and it is still there, correct, through the building

CATCH A STAR
Point until the ring finds one, then press when the marker crosses the
zone. That is the whole thing. A bright star is generous, a faint one
is not, and that is the entire difficulty curve.

THE CONSTELLATIONS ASSEMBLE THEMSELVES
Catch both ends of a line and the line lights up. Orion draws itself in
front of you over a few evenings, and the gaps are what send you back
out.

DRAW YOUR OWN
The 88 are somebody else's drawing. Join stars you have caught into a
shape of your own, name it, and it hangs on the sky beside the ones the
Greeks left.

A RECORD, NOT A SCORE
Every star you hold keeps its catalogue entry — designation, spectral
class, magnitude, distance, how high it ever gets from your latitude —
and one line you wrote about the night you caught it.

IT WORKS WHEREVER YOU ARE
Noon, indoors, under cloud, in a lit city. The phone is a window onto
the real sky rather than a mirror of what your eye can see.

NOTHING LEAVES THE PHONE
No account, no server, no analytics, no advertising. Your location is
used to work out which stars are above your horizon and is never sent
anywhere, because there is nowhere to send it.


## Version history (last 2 releases)

### 1.1 — 2026-09-10

It explains itself now. The first minute tells you what to do, one
sentence at a time, and each one goes away once you have done it. If you
opened this and could not work out how to catch a star, that was the
app's fault, and it is fixed.

Čeština. The whole app, not only the store page.

The Moon is catchable. Point at it and it locks like any star — and
because the Moon is drawn wherever it really is, that still works when it
is under your feet, on the far side of the Earth.

Tell the compass where north is. A phone compass can be out by 10–20°,
which is enough to put the wrong star in the ring. Point at the Moon,
align, and the whole sky snaps into place.

Also fixed: the arrow that leads you to a star could point the wrong way
when you were nearly on top of it.

### 1.0 — 2026-09-09

No release notes.

## More apps by Matej Blinka

- [Filvy](https://appshunter.io/ios/app/filvy/id6762308752)

All apps by Matej Blinka: https://appshunter.io/developer/1886509387

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*Data collected daily from the US App Store and indexed by [AppsHunter](https://appshunter.io/). User reviews are verbatim App Store reviews. Ratings, prices and chart positions refresh continuously; this snapshot is from 2026-09-11.*