Smart Telescope Planner vs Telescope Log

BigSky Planner helps smart telescope users prepare an observing night before they head outside. Save your observing sites, set up your smart telescope, filter a bundled target catalog, and build a timed plan for the night. Target cards show magnitude, object type, first view time, time in view, azimuth and altitude. Details adds capture guidance for your default telescope, with Min, Opt and Best integration times and filter-aware notes. Key features - Save and reuse observing sites, and mark a default - Smart telescope profiles with altitude, timing and Equatorial Mode limits for each model - Filter targets by catalog, magnitude, object type, altitude and azimuth, with exact catalog-number search - Planets, the Moon and comets - One target card per object, with its common name - Build Plan places every selected target across its Clear Sky, so the times overlap. Balance Plan and Use Priority set the time shares - An alert when a capture is shorter than 30 minutes, with a longer seat or a replacement to choose from - Weather from NOAA in the United States and MET Norway elsewhere, with no account or key. Open-Meteo works with your own key. - Save, reopen, print and share plans - Back up on iPhone or iPad and restore on a Mac or Windows PC, or the other way around - Text follows your iPhone or iPad text size - Light and dark appearance, an illustrated Help guide and a full PDF manual Free download with a 20-day free trial BigSky Planner is free to download and includes a free 20-day trial. After the trial, Full Access is a one-time in-app purchase: no subscription and no automatic charge. Your saved sites and plans are kept. If you bought the app before it became free, you keep Full Access with no additional purchase. Purchase questions: support@bigskyastro.com. Your data stays on your device. No account is required.

Stargazing planner and telescope observing log for amateur astronomers. Know what is worth observing tonight with your telescope, your eyepieces and your sky. Then log it in seconds in a true red night mode. Works offline. No account, no ads. Pay once, no subscription. Open Darksite on a clear evening and it lays out your night like an almanac page: your dark window, the moon's schedule, the cloud outlook, and a shortlist of targets picked for your gear. Every pick explains itself in plain words: "M13: peaks 11:24 pm at 68 degrees, fits your 24 mm eyepiece, moon well out of the way, on your Herschel 400 list." No mystery scores. No thousand-object dumps. Then it runs the session. Queue your targets, work through them at the eyepiece in a genuine red field mode (every screen night-vision safe, down to a custom red keyboard), and capture each observation in seconds: hold the button, say what you saw. Date, time, site, gear, magnification and field of view fill themselves in. And it keeps your observing life. Every session searchable by object, eyepiece, sky quality or site. Messier, Herschel 400 and Lunar certificate programs track themselves as you log, with validated, coordinator-ready export packages when you are ready to submit. BUILT FOR OBSERVERS • Tonight, for your telescope: gear-aware target picks with the reasoning spelled out • Session queue: plan the night, reorder by transit, carry unfinished targets forward • A real observing log: seeing and transparency scales, sketches, voice notes, photos • Gear locker: scopes, eyepieces, filters, Barlows; true field of view, magnification and exit pupil computed for every combination • Life-lists: Messier, Herschel 400, Lunar; watch the certificates fill in • Red field mode: near-black and red everywhere, brightness floored, no white flashes • Sky events: ISS passes, meteor showers, aurora outlook, cloud and conditions YOURS, PROPERLY • Private by design: no account, no ads, no tracking. Your log lives on your device • Works fully offline: the catalog, the math and your log never need a signal • Your data is never hostage: CSV and JSON export and import, backup and restore, free, always • Pay once for Pro. No subscription. Ever. Darksite is not a planetarium. It is the missing half of the hobby: the planner and the logbook, done properly. It works alongside the sky-map app you already own.