The night sky is a truly beautiful sight to behold, with millions of twinkling lights pulsing to their own natural rhythm, undisturbed by centuries of human life.
For many people though that’s pretty much the extent of their celestial knowledge, with most constellations so abstract and stars so hard to identify that you’d need some kind of self-updating map to locate them.
Google Sky Map sets out to help put to rest the timeless argument of ‘which one’s Hercules?’ by providing an Augmented Reality program that displays the planets, constellations and stars’ positions in real-time from wherever you are in the world.
The network locator kicks in as soon as the app starts up, syncing the night sky to your location and placing the stars into the ‘virtual sky’. Unlike other AR apps, Google Sky Maps appears to then pre-load the positions of the stars into your handset so that moving the phone updates pretty much immediately, a blessed relief from the snail-like update speed of other AR programs.
With such a vast number of stars and constellations out there though it would be easy to overwhelm the user with labels and options, and this is an area that Google Sky Map handles extremely well.
Keeping every one of the layers selectable via the menu button, the user can quickly hide anything from planets, labels and even entire constellations with a quick tap. There are no sub-menus to navigate through, nor any delay in switching to the option from the main viewer, which helps keep things simple and easy to use.
One of the neatest features in Google Sky Map is the ability to activate a ‘night time’ mode that reduces the light from the screen and turns the display red. While it seems a little pointless if you were looking up to the sky with a lamppost/house nearby, for those in areas of less light pollution it should prove very handy.
The main disappointment with the application mainly comes from what it doesn’t do, rather than what it does. Star names are oddly absent for the most part, with even close stars like Barnard’s Star missing from the display.
Instead it mainly focuses on often bafflingly hard to remember ones like M77 that lie along the route of the constellations. It makes sense in terms of what the app’s main focus is, but it’s nevertheless disappointing that it doesn’t at least name a few of the closest stars to our solar system.
The lack of any kind of information about what you’re looking at is another aspect that is disappointing, especially as competing AR sky-based app Celeste managed to pack in a good deal of facts alongside its own sky-tracking abilities.
Taken as simply a way of finding constellations and planets in the night sky, Google Sky Map is a very well produced, quick and easy to use app that does what it sets out to do with aplomb. As a ‘map of the sky’ though, it lacks the information and educational value to make it an essential download.
Google Sky Map is excellent for knowing where to look for the different constellations and planets, but is comparatively sparse on other features compared to its rivals.
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App: Google Sky Map
Developer: Google Inc.
Price: Free
Version Reviewed: 1.4
Requires: Your location, read phone state, modify global settings, prevent phone from sleeping, modify/delete SD card contents
Size: 652Kb
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Pocket Picks Score: 
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