Orbit vs Astrelia

Orbit is a solar system explorer built on real NASA data, not just illustrations. EXPLORE Rotate detailed 3D globes of every planet, listen to real recorded sounds from NASA missions, and browse real photos pulled live from NASA's own archive. See today's Astronomy Picture of the Day and the latest real photos from the Mars rovers. GO DEEPER Browse black holes, galaxies, exoplanets, and nebulae — plus a live feed of NASA's most recent Hubble and Webb telescope images, real current space weather, and the latest from NASA's Artemis Moon missions. FIND WHAT'S REALLY ABOVE YOU Point your phone at the sky and Sky Map shows you real stars, planets, and constellations, calculated live from your actual location and the current time — not a static illustration. BUILD YOUR OWN SOLAR SYSTEM Drop in planets and stars, and watch real gravitational physics take over. Smash two suns together and watch a black hole form. PLAY Test what you've learned with a Solar System Quiz, dodge asteroids, and pilot a rocket toward space. Orbit's free tier includes full access to the Explore tab and Mars rover photos. Orbit Premium ($4.99/month) unlocks Deep Space, the Solar System Builder, and all games. Terms of Use (EULA): https://www.apple.com/legal/internet-services/itunes/dev/stdeula/

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.