NearLight vs Orbit Map

NearLight is a 3D space simulator that spans the whole journey of an astronomy fan: from a real telescope under tonight's sky to a relativistic starship and the edge of a black hole. Explore the Solar System on exact orbits, fly through 1,000 light-years of real stars, and see with your own eyes what the Lorentz factor does to time. Is your favorite sci-fi movie physically right? Check it. YOUR NIGHT SKY, TONIGHT Step onto a field on Earth and look up: the real sky for your location and moment: by GPS or from an offline catalog of 34,000 cities. Six telescopes stand ready, from a 70 mm beginner refractor to a 12-inch truss Dobsonian, with eight eyepieces, a Barlow, Moon and nebula filters (UHC, OIII), every instrument with its true magnification, field of view, image orientation and brightness. The full Messier catalog is in the sky: over 40 objects as real as astrophotographs at their exact positions and sizes, every object rebuilt from reference photos, 341,000 Tycho-2 stars deep in the field. Light pollution (Bortle scale), atmospheric seeing, twinkling, horizon extinction, even moonlight washing the galaxies out of the eyepiece, this sky behaves like the real one. A Redlight mode protects your dark adaptation. Wind the clock to August 12, 2026 and stand in Iceland or Spain: the total solar eclipse happens with true geometry, corona included. "Tonight's Sky" builds your observing plan, the "Top Objects now" wheel rolls absolute beginners to the ten best sights of the moment and all the Messier objects wait to be discovered, for good. THE SOLAR SYSTEM The Sun, all 8 planets and their major moons on ephemeris-true orbits, validated against JPL data: moon transits and shadow events at the correct times, Saturn's ring shadow, true axial tilts. Classical Spaceflight flies real missions: departure burn, coast, flip, capture burn into orbit, including Voyager-class gravity assists past Jupiter. INTERSTELLAR Search and inspect 8,000+ real stars with names, distances, stellar data, exoplanet hosts and their neighbors within 10 light-years. Plan relativistic journeys in Constant-c or Constant-g mode with acceleration, coast and braking phases. Compare Onboard Travel Time (OTT) with Earth Travel Time (ETT), read the length-contracted distance, peak speed and the energy bill (Joule, TWh, PWh or "Sun-output time"). Ride along in three cameras and near light speed the cockpit shows real relativistic optics: star aberration, Doppler colour shift and beaming. THE WHOLE MILKY WAY Pull back until the galaxy fits on screen: 100,000 light-years across, four spiral arms, the barred core: shaped from the NASA/JPL photograph down to the dust lanes and the red glow of its star-forming regions, with up to 450,000 stars drawn at once. Sol sits where it really does, 27,000 light-years out on its thin local arm. Pick any point and a route runs there from home, telling you the distance, the region you are aiming at: bulge, inner disk, rim and whether you are heading coreward or out. Then fly it, with the same relativistic clocks: a trip to the galactic centre costs a few decades on board and 27,000 years on Earth. BLACK HOLES 70+ known black holes from TON 618 to fictional Gargantua, rendered with a scientific Kerr ray tracer. Change mass and spin, sink toward the event horizon or the innermost orbit, and watch two clocks drift apart: one hour here, seven years on Earth, the Interstellar scenario, on your own screen. 6-DoF navigation: rotate, pinch-zoom, pan on every axis Auto rotation, labels, chase and cockpit cams, one-tap Reset View Ambient space music and living nightscape sounds. Native on Mac, iPad and iPhone. English and German, fully localized including VoiceOver Fully offline: no account, no tracking, and your location never leaves your device.

Orbit Map is a working atlas of everything humanity has left in orbit. Around 31,900 tracked objects, propagated on your device with the same SGP4/SDP4 model the industry uses, drawn on a real 3D Earth you can turn in your hands. Point it at tonight and it tells you when the Space Station crosses your roof. Search a name or a NORAD number and the orbit appears. Tap one group and ten thousand Starlink satellites light up at once. WHAT YOU CAN SEE • Every catalogued object: payloads, spent rocket stages and debris • Live positions from public orbital elements, computed offline on your device • Orbit paths, ground tracks and the horizon footprint of any spacecraft • Starlink, GPS, Galileo, GLONASS, OneWeb, weather satellites, debris shells • Altitude, speed, period, inclination, apogee, perigee, country, launch year • Filter and colour the field by object type, altitude, country or status • Detailed 3D models of real spacecraft families • Run time forward and back, or freeze the atlas and read it PASSES OVER YOUR HEAD • When the Station, Tiangong or Hubble crosses your sky • Rise, peak and set with azimuth and elevation for each pass • Sunlight and darkness checked, because a pass you cannot see is not a pass • Any place on Earth as your observing point, with its own time zone • Notifications before something flies over THE ACADEMY 54 lessons, more than eight hours, written for this atlas rather than borrowed from a textbook. Every lesson carries measured numbers you can verify in the inspector, the misconception it exists to correct, two things to do on the globe, a comprehension check and the vocabulary it introduces. Nine modules, from the first question to responsible interpretation: orbital mechanics. Reading element sets. Orbit families. Real missions. Observing the sky. The space environment. Debris and safety. Signals and navigation. Data literacy. Sourced from NASA, ESA, CelesTrak and Space-Track. ON EVERY SCREEN YOU OWN iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple TV and Apple Vision Pro. Lesson progress, observing places and display settings stay together through iCloud. HONEST ABOUT WHAT IT IS Orbit Map propagates public General Perturbations elements. Accuracy degrades as elements age and can differ by kilometres. Pass timing uses geometric sunlight and a 10° horizon; weather and apparent brightness are not modelled, so a sunlit pass is an opportunity rather than a promise. This is an educational atlas. It is not a conjunction assessment tool, not a navigation aid, and not for antenna pointing. Every screen states which snapshot it is using and how old the elements behind it are, because knowing the age of your data is part of reading it. WHERE THE DATA COMES FROM Public GP elements from Space-Track.org and USSPACECOM, cross-checked against an independent CelesTrak set before any release ships. Positions come from a Vallado-compatible SGP4/SDP4 implementation verified against the published reference vectors. Catalogue updates are signed and every byte is checked before it replaces what you already have. PREMIUM The free atlas is complete and accurate: the whole globe, the entire catalogue, search, orbit paths, and passes for the Station, Tiangong and Hubble. Premium opens all 54 lessons, every constellation, the full Orbital Lens, seven-day forecasts from up to ten saved places, pass notifications, every spacecraft model, the time machine and iCloud sync. Subscription Terms: Payment charged to iTunes Account. Auto-renews unless disabled 24 hours before period ends. Manage in Account Settings. https://www.apple.com/legal/internet-services/itunes/dev/stdeula/ Data provided by Space-Track.org and USSPACECOM. Validation data provided by CelesTrak, Dr. T.S. Kelso. Earth imagery courtesy of NASA.