Look at the stars! Pocket Stars Smartphone available now in Beta version
December 08, 2003 [MS Smartphone] | By anonymous 1.
My God! Itīs full of stars!
(a quote from "2010" science-fiction movie)
Pocket Stars Smartphone is a high accuracy star chart and guide to the heavens for Windows Mobile Smartphones. Based on the award winning version for Pocket PCīs, Pocket Stars Smartphone combines rich capabilities with simple and quick navigation.
This is one heck of a very very impressive program! It also demonstrates why it is better to buy Microsoft smartphone, rather than Symbian based one: there are several thousands of high quality programs for Pocket PC available now and many of these programs are being ported to MS Smartphone nowadays. Symbian phones cannot beat it! And since both these platforms run the very same core OS, such porting is a breeze...
Star Chart Features:
- 9110 stars
- Constellations
- Solar system bodies
- Messier and Caldwell Objects
- Display of orbital paths for inner solar system bodies showing daily positions for one year centered on current date.
- Manual or automatic control of star magnitudes. Simple control over which objects to display. Overall, these features give great control of visual clutter given the limited screen real estate on the Smartphone.
- Black, white, and red star chart colors for normal, bright, and night viewing conditions, respectively.
- Chart can be rotated to any of the 8 compass points and also flipped along the North - South axis. This allows the either overhead (East and West reversed) or non-overhead (East and West normal) viewing.
- Polar grid with hour angle and declination labels.
- Zenith grid.
- Search and scroll to constellation, body, star, or Messier / Caldwell objects.
- User location set by city selection, or by entering Latitude and Longitude.
- Star data is from the Bright Star Catalog (5th Revised Edition), comprising the 9110 brightest stars using J2000 equatorial positions and the International Celestial Reference Frame (ICRF). Corrections are performed for proper motions and parallax.
- Planet ephemeris data from Jet Propulsion Laboratory using the DE405 database. DE405 is JPLīs latest planetary ephemeris with correction for both nutations and librations. DE405 uses the J2000 International Celestial Reference Frame (ICRF). The portion of this database provided with Pocket Stars covers the years CE 2000 to CE 2020. Other ephemeris date ranges are available for download here.
- Core positional calculation routines based on "Novas" (Naval Observatory Vector Astrometry Subroutines Version 2.0.1).
To download this program click here.
Moreover Jay from nomad electronics - the vendor of the program - writes:
You are cordially invited to help beta test the near final release
of Pocket Stars Smartphone. Participants will receive a free copy
of the final version for their efforts as well as hearty thanks
from the development team.
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