AstroHelm vs Night Sky Planner

Find galaxies, nebulae, star clusters, and planets without struggling with star hopping. AstroHelm turns your iPhone into a smart push-to finder for almost any manual telescope. Using fast, on-device plate solving, AstroHelm recognizes the stars in your camera view, determines exactly where your telescope is pointing, and guides you to your target. No proprietary telescope. No motorized GoTo mount. Just attach your iPhone with a rigid phone mount and start exploring. NOT SURE WHAT TO OBSERVE? AstroHelm can help with that too. Best Tonight highlights bright, interesting objects visible from your location, so you can spend less time planning and more time observing. HOW IT WORKS Mount: Attach your iPhone securely to your telescope tube, or to your camera using a standard bracket or hot-shoe mount. Choose: Pick a galaxy, nebula, star cluster, planet, or other target from AstroHelm's catalog. Point: Move your telescope while following the on-screen guidance. AstroHelm repeatedly plate-solves the sky and shows you exactly how to reach your target. CENTER: When the reticle reaches the target, look through the eyepiece—or start your exposure. BUILT FOR THE GEAR YOU ALREADY OWN AstroHelm works with manual telescopes and cameras without requiring a specific telescope brand or proprietary accessory. It can also integrate with compatible astronomy software and equipment using standard telescope-control protocols. Whether you're exploring the sky with a Dobsonian or framing a deep-sky object with a camera, AstroHelm gets you from “I want to see that” to “there it is.”

Night Sky Planner works out what's worth looking at tonight from your exact spot, and exactly when to catch it. It's for people who actually go out and look. Everything runs on your phone, so it works at the end of a dirt road with no signal and no account. It starts with your night: sunset, the three twilights, the moment the sky goes properly dark, then dawn on the way back. It also tracks moonrise, moonset, and how lit the Moon is, since that's usually what washes out a faint target. Then it scores about 200 objects for where you are tonight: the Messier catalog, NGC and IC deep-sky objects, the brighter stars, and the planets. For each one you get when it clears your horizon, how high it climbs, when it peaks, and the stretch of real darkness when it's worth pointing at. PLANNING THE NIGHT • Night strip: the whole night on one timeline, dusk through darkness to dawn • Gantt view: every target you've picked and its window across the night, marked at its highest point • Best Nights: ranks the coming nights for one object, so you know whether to go now or wait out the Moon FINDING IT • POINT ME: hold the phone up and a compass-and-tilt guide walks you onto the target you chose • A printable finder rose with azimuth and altitude, for setting circles or the naked eye SEEING WHAT IT IS • A sky-survey plate for every object, plus the plain facts: type, magnitude, size, constellation • Thumbnails ship inside the app; tap once to pull the full-resolution plate and keep it for offline nights MAKING IT YOURS • Filter by gear (naked eye, binoculars, or telescope) and by object type • Set location by GPS, or search a place and drop a pin • A clean share card for the night's list • Paper and night themes, in a plain monospaced almanac style • iPhone and iPad, portrait or landscape PRIVATE, AND IT STAYS THAT WAY No account, no sign-up, no ads, nothing tracking you, and no server of ours for anything to land on. The motion sensors stay on the phone, and when the sky view uses the camera to help you line up on a star, those frames are read and thrown away on the spot — nothing is photographed or saved. It does reach the network for four things: an hourly cloud forecast for your spot, which is the one it fetches on its own; a place search, if you type one; Apple Maps, if you open the map picker; and a full-resolution sky-survey plate from CDS in Strasbourg, if you ask for one. Every bit of the astronomy is computed on your phone, so it all still works with no signal. Set your location and see tonight's list. Clear skies.