APOD Pro vs Ad Astra

Explore the universe, one photo at a time. View NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD) on your iPhone or iPad. Browse today’s image or scroll back through past entries to discover stunning space photography, galaxies, nebulae, planets, and more. Tap any photo to zoom in and see every detail. Features • Access NASA’s daily Astronomy Picture of the Day • Scroll through the full archive of past photos • Zoom in on high-resolution images • Read NASA’s official explanations for each picture Perfect for space enthusiasts, students, and anyone who loves exploring the cosmos.

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.