Star Chart — Community App Review
Version: 0.1.3
Star Chart draws the sky over you: nine thousand stars from the Yale Bright Star Catalogue, the constellation figures, and the Sun, Moon and planets drawn as rings so they are never mistaken for stars. Tapping anything gives its designation, magnitude, altitude and bearing.
It is black on white. Every other star chart on a screen puts white stars on a black field because it is imitating the night, and on this panel that is the worst thing to ask for: a screen of black is the slowest and most ghost-prone thing E Ink does, cannot be read in daylight, and drowns every mark on top of it. Printed atlases have been black-on-white for four hundred years, and those are the ones people take outside.
The projection is a paper planisphere’s — overhead at the centre, the horizon at the rim — and the direction you are facing goes at the bottom, with a button under the chart to turn it. A planisphere is held up and read from underneath, which mirrors it; getting that backwards is how people end up with Orion the wrong way round.
Any time and any place. Typing a latitude and longitude grants nothing and is the only way to chart somewhere you are not: what will be up at ten tonight from a campsite next week is usually the real question. The one permission, coarse location, is asked only if you press “Ask the GPS”, and there is no internet permission at all — the catalogue is in the app.
After AndroidPlanisphere by Timo Engel, whose astronomy this runs on unchanged.
What I am unsure about is the turning. Should the chart follow the compass on its own, or is one that moves only when you tell it to the right thing on a screen this slow?
Source, and the licence it inherits: GitHub - wanderwildwood/seizu: Star Chart — the sky over you, drawn like a paper atlas in black on white. A planisphere for the Mudita Kompakt. · GitHub — GPL-3.0-or-later.