Ad Astra vs Astrelia

Per aspera ad astra — through hardships to the stars. Ad Astra turns your iPhone into a living planetarium. Raise your phone and the sky above you comes alive: every star drawn from real astronomical catalogs, constellations traced with their figures, planets and the Moon exactly where they truly are, and satellites drifting overhead — all rendered on the GPU at up to 120 Hz for a perfectly smooth sky. THE LIVE SKY • Point your phone anywhere — motion sensors aim the view where you aim the device • Stars from the Hipparcos and Yale Bright Star catalogs, scaled by real brightness • A light-pollution slider: slide from a mountain dark-sky site to a bright city and watch the stars thin realistically • Night-vision mode preserves your dark adaptation under a real sky • Atmosphere, photographic horizon, and an immersive mode that fades every control away MEET THE STARS UP CLOSE Tap any star, planet, moon, or satellite for a rotatable 3D portrait — stars reconstructed from their real spectral data, planets and moons with detailed texture maps, Saturn with its rings, and real photographs of the ISS, Hubble, and more. Every object carries at-a-glance facts, stories for the famous ones, and a live Wikipedia summary. FLY THE SOLAR SYSTEM A free-flying 3D solar system with real orbital mechanics. Scrub the timeline through days, months, and years and watch the orbits evolve. Overview and map modes make it feel like a navigation app for space. TRAVEL THE MILKY WAY Fly around a GPU point-cloud model of our galaxy: spiral arms, globular clusters, companion galaxies, and the black hole at the center — then run the galactic clock and watch the arms shear over millions of years. RELIVE LEGENDARY MISSIONS Replay Vostok 1, Apollo 8, Apollo 11, the Voyagers, and the Mars rovers: real launch photography fading into a live trajectory simulation with a mission HUD showing altitude, speed, and distance in your local units. The sky is up there every night. Ad Astra shows you what you are looking at.

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.