The App Store has seen a few astronomy Apps but none that really interested me like ‘Star Walk’.
You can see all the constellations in the sky above you by setting your location. It can detect your location automatically by using the GPS built into the iPad and iPhone, if it doesn't find you location you can set it manually as well. I was blown away by this feature alone, it’s so cool to see the sky above you in real time and because we know all the future movements and orientations of everything in the sky like clockwork, ‘Sky Walk’ allows us to go way way into the past to see what the sky above looked like then and the ability to go into the future is also here.
So how do you interact and find out about the constellations. Well thats very very simple, you simply do the universally accepted swipe across your iPhone and iPad screen to see the planets and stars and to get a closer look you pinch in. The coolest way to use ‘Star Walk’ is by holding your iPhone or iPad up to the sky and as you move the device the sky on ‘Star Walk’ also moves with it giving you an exact same sky on your iPad as the one above. This seemed like magic and it’s the most obvious way to do astronomy. If you see something in the sky above that interests you simply hold your iPad up in the air, touch the object your interested in and read all about it in great detail and then you can see where it was in the past and where it will go in the future.
Star Walk allows you see all of the constellations like the ‘Big Dipper’ ect. It surprised me by the huge amount there are in our night sky. I was reading a few other reviews and read this and couldn’t help but share ‘Let me give you an example of how handy this is. I was at a party just a few weekends ago where there was a debate over whether or not a twinkling object in the sky was a satellite or star. I was adamant about it being a satellite and went into a lengthy explanation as to how I could tell. Well, the debate continued on for about 10 minutes before another party goer stepped in to lend his two cents. Unfortunately for me he was armed with Star Walk. He whipped out his phone, pointed it toward the object, and proceeded to tell us the exact name of the star. How can you compete with that? You can’t!’
Another feature that I love in ‘Star Walk’ is the picture of the day. Some of the most amazing photos I have ever seen and I can tweet them so everyone following SlinkyStudio.
This is one of those Apps that every iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad owner has to have. You really never know when this may come in to be useful. The sheer amount of content here is another thing that amazes me and it’s only $2.99, thats a crazy price for all this information. Books about astronomy are about 20x that amount and you wouldn’t be able to get anywhere near close to the amount of information your getting here here.
