PoleScope AR vs Astrelia

PoleScope AR turns your iPhone into a polar-alignment scope for your telescope — and a beautiful almanac of the night sky's culture. It works 100% offline and makes zero network requests. — POLAR ALIGNMENT, IN AR — Point your phone at the sky and PoleScope AR overlays the exact position of the celestial pole using ARKit — no need to see Polaris, no compass calibration. Get your equatorial mount roughly aligned in seconds, then refine with the built-in drift-alignment helper for imaging-grade precision. — PLAN YOUR NIGHT — A one-tap observing planner ranks tonight's best deep-sky objects for your location, with altitude and magnitude. A coarse Bortle light-pollution estimate helps you judge the sky. — EXPLORE THE SKY ATLAS — Pan a live star map of bright stars, constellation lines, planets and deep-sky objects. Tap any object to see its data. — TODAY: THE SKY'S CULTURE — A daily card brings the 24 solar terms, traditional festivals, a poetic "star journal," and a situation-drama for your zodiac sign. — YOUR BIRTHDAY SKY — See the night sky exactly as it appeared at the moment and place you were born, and discover the lunar mansion the Sun was passing through that day. — POLESCOPE PRO (one-time unlock) — A single, non-subscription purchase unlocks the premium star-culture library: constellation and 28-lunar-mansion mythology, NASA / Hubble / Spitzer hero photos of famous stars, the full situation-drama theater, and high-resolution birthday-poster export & sharing. The entire alignment tool stays free forever. Purchases restore on all your devices. — PRIVACY — No accounts, no tracking, no analytics, no third-party SDKs. Your location is used only on-device for astronomical math and never leaves your phone. Clear skies!

Raise your phone toward the sky and Astrelia shows you what is actually up there: stars, planets, the Moon and the Sun, placed for your exact location and this exact instant. Tap anything and it tells you everything it knows. POINT AT THE SKY Around 8,900 naked-eye stars, sized and coloured the way the eye sees them. Constellation lines, the ecliptic with the live planets, and a Sun and Moon computed with topocentric parallax and atmospheric refraction, so they sit where you can genuinely see them. Pinch to zoom and more names appear. Tap any star to identify it. Scrub time twelve hours forward or back and watch the whole sky move. Aim at something bright and align, and the compass error that ruins most sky apps is cancelled out. TONIGHT One screen for what is happening: the Moon's phase, sunrise and sunset, which planets are up right now and which are below the horizon, meteor showers near their peak, and what is coming — eclipses, oppositions, solstices, greatest elongations. All of it searched out of the live ephemeris, not read from a hardcoded list. NUMBERS THAT MEAN SOMETHING Every object opens into real astrophysics: distance, spectral class, temperature, luminosity, derived radius, orbital elements. Next to them, plain language — the year the light you are looking at left that star, how many Suns it would take to match it, what you would weigh on that planet, where the star falls on the HR diagram, and a one-line biography of its life. Anything unfamiliar has a glossary entry a tap away. THE GALAXY MAP Leave Earth entirely and free-fly a 3D map built from real data: about 25,000 catalogued stars at their true distances, the Milky Way as its real barred spiral, and deep-sky landmarks at their real positions, distances and sizes. Twenty-seven nebulae are built from public-domain telescope photographs, so their shape and colour are the ones the telescope saw — fly into them and they hold up in three dimensions. Fly to a star and its confirmed exoplanets are there, orbiting it. At the galactic centre, Sagittarius A* is rendered by tracing light through curved spacetime: the galaxy behind it genuinely bends around it. CONSTELLATIONS All 88 IAU constellations, plus asterisms, historical figures and cultural skies, each drawn over its real stars. Open any of them in 3D and the familiar shape falls apart into deep space, because a constellation is a line of sight rather than a thing. Astrelia computes all of it on your device from catalogs that ship inside the app. No account, no subscription, no ads, no tracking, and no network needed to use it. Every dataset, algorithm and image behind it is credited in About → Sources. Astrelia has a sister app, Selenia, which reads the same real sky the astrological way.