Night Sky Planner vs Skyla

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.

Ever looked up and wondered what you're seeing? Hold Skyla up to the sky and the real stars, planets, constellations and satellites above you come to life — placed exactly for where you are, right now. WHY YOU'LL LOVE IT • Point your phone at the sky and it lines up with the real view (AR) • Tap anything to instantly learn what it is and how to find it • See Saturn's rings, Jupiter's moons, the Moon's craters, comets and the Milky Way in beautiful detail • Travel through time to see the sky on any night, past or future • No ads. No subscriptions. No account. Just the sky above you. PLAN THE PERFECT NIGHT • Tonight's Targets — a ranked checklist of the best things to see right now; tap to fly straight to each one • Darkness Tonight — sunset, the twilights and the exact hours of true, Moon-free darkness • Sky Conditions — a live darkness score tells you at a glance if tonight is worth it • Satellite Passes — every visible ISS, Tiangong and Hubble flyover this week, with reminders • Planets Tonight, Comets, an interactive Moon Calendar and an agenda of upcoming meteor showers, conjunctions and Moon phases MAKE IT YOURS • Keep a personal observing log — rate what you see, add notes and track your Messier progress • Save favourites, set your sky's darkness (Bortle) for tailored advice, and get a gentle nightly reminder • A pocket Sky Guide with dozens of short reads, home-screen widgets and an Apple Watch app From total beginners to seasoned skywatchers, Skyla makes the night sky make sense.