Distant Suns 5 vs Ad Astra

Distant Suns: The night sky, reimagined. 2013 finalist in the Family category of TabTimes' best tablet app contest; "I am putting together some mobile astronomy apps for our local "Sky's the Limit" Observatory in Twentynine Palms, CA. I have been searching for something as good as, or better than, Distant Suns. Short answer: I have not found it yet. ...nothing portrays the night sky as well as Distant Suns. Distant Suns has been your personal guide to the cosmos since 1985. First on the desktop, now right in your hands. While others play games, you can travel to the stars. Award-winning Distant Suns has the reputation of both having one of the most realistic displays of the night sky, while being one of the easiest to use astronomy apps for casual sky watchers as well as serious astronomers. •Named in the "100 Essential Apps" by iLounge •Featured on NPR's MarketPlace Features include: •No Internet required. Just a sense of wonder. •View from the Earth or out in the solar system •Simply aim and gaze. •Over 18 million pinpoint stars scintillating like diamond dust in the palm of your hand (18 mil? Yup.) •Integrated with NASA's Night Sky Network space events in your area (US only at present) •What's Up? Gives a quick one snapshot overview of the evening's sky •Realistic ghostly band of the Milky Way •Stories behind each constellation •Viewpoint Lock keeps any object centered •Current weather patterns on the earth, updated daily •Change the look of the stars •Galaxies, nebula and star clusters •Hubble Space Telescope images •All 8 planets (or 9 for you purists) •GPS aware •Special color mode preserves your night vision. •Touch the sky to reveal hidden data for each object •Planetary data and information First Light is a proud member of Moms with Apps, a collaborative group of family-friendly developers with family-friendly apps. Twitter: @distantsuns Support: www.distantsuns.com

Per aspera ad astra — through hardships to the stars. Ad Astra turns your iPhone into a living planetarium. Raise your phone and the sky above you comes alive: every star drawn from real astronomical catalogs, constellations traced with their figures, planets and the Moon exactly where they truly are, and satellites drifting overhead — all rendered on the GPU at up to 120 Hz for a perfectly smooth sky. THE LIVE SKY • Point your phone anywhere — motion sensors aim the view where you aim the device • Stars from the Hipparcos and Yale Bright Star catalogs, scaled by real brightness • A light-pollution slider: slide from a mountain dark-sky site to a bright city and watch the stars thin realistically • Night-vision mode preserves your dark adaptation under a real sky • Atmosphere, photographic horizon, and an immersive mode that fades every control away MEET THE STARS UP CLOSE Tap any star, planet, moon, or satellite for a rotatable 3D portrait — stars reconstructed from their real spectral data, planets and moons with detailed texture maps, Saturn with its rings, and real photographs of the ISS, Hubble, and more. Every object carries at-a-glance facts, stories for the famous ones, and a live Wikipedia summary. FLY THE SOLAR SYSTEM A free-flying 3D solar system with real orbital mechanics. Scrub the timeline through days, months, and years and watch the orbits evolve. Overview and map modes make it feel like a navigation app for space. TRAVEL THE MILKY WAY Fly around a GPU point-cloud model of our galaxy: spiral arms, globular clusters, companion galaxies, and the black hole at the center — then run the galactic clock and watch the arms shear over millions of years. RELIVE LEGENDARY MISSIONS Replay Vostok 1, Apollo 8, Apollo 11, the Voyagers, and the Mars rovers: real launch photography fading into a live trajectory simulation with a mission HUD showing altitude, speed, and distance in your local units. The sky is up there every night. Ad Astra shows you what you are looking at.