Satellite Safari app good for
This is a great app! I have really enjoyed it and am amazed at everything it contains. I am amazed at the number of satellites over my head. Get this app!
I have used their software an app for many years and find it to be very professionally done and easy to use. I use this particular software for helping me see what GPS satellites are in the sky at the time.
Another fun app. 2thumbs up.
How about adding notifications for northern lights from CMEs based on location?
This app is an easy to use way to learn more about some of the largest and brightest satellites in orbit around the Earth.
It finds your location using your devices geo location services, and then calculates the position of satellites, updating them frequently.
Click on a satellite and get more information on it, including many photos, and data on upcoming passes when you may be able to view it. You can even set alerts.
You can view the satellites path from your position on earth, as an orbit around a 3d manipulate blue globe, as a path on a 2d map of earth, or from the near the satellite itself, showing a 3d rendering of it, simulating the lighting angle from the Sun.
When using the sky view, the app also draws constellations and labels brighter stars and planets so you can get your bearings.
The app also has a "Night Vision" mode that turns the screen red to help preserve your night vision.
As an amateur astronomer, I can use this app to figure out what that satellite that I just saw was, or to plan for observing and photographing passes by the International Space Station.
For the casual night sky stargazer, or space technology buff, the information provided on the satellites would be really interesting.
I really recommend this app. Theres really nothing like it out there.
This is a beautiful app. The possibilities for use during outreach events are mind boggling. Considering how much Ive seen Sky Safari evolve in the past few years, Im confident this will be yet another indispensable app from Southern Stars!
Super smooth interface, with lots of different ways to get the same info but trough different visualizations. Very well done!
Some bad moments
So much work went in to this and its just so buggy. Spend your money elsewhere.
If you want to watch sats fly overhead, this app will not allow you to be easily alerted to a nights worth. If you only want to watch the orbits of a particular satellite, such as the ISS, this app can help at its current stage of development.
Version 1.1 advances the programming, yet is still based on selecting individual satellites. It is impossibly tedious to prepare an entire nights viewing, because one must select dozens of individual sats and each of their many individual appearances during the course of the night, and then set notifications for each. The apps slow response worsens the problem. It needs a one, or few, tap method to say, "Alert me to all the sats that will be visible tonight at this location, between these hours." Or, follow the model of GoSatWatch, which simply posts alerts to every rising sat meeting criteria for location and brightness until told to stop.
The pick list for manual locations includes not a single town in my state! Much better to allow locations to be picked from Google Maps. Fortunately, it is possible to enter lat/long coordinates instead, so at least the app is finally useable through a convoluted method.
Im still not worried. These are the best programmers on iOS. Theyll get it right, and when they do, this sat tracker will be more sophisticated and flexible than anything else available. The problem seems to be that the underlying guts, borrowed from SkySafari, were never intended to find batches of rising objects, and all the nifty new features were intended for tracking the SkyCube mission. It makes sense to extend that to tracking any single satellite, but batch processing of groups of sats still needs to be worked into the patch.
Prior review:
A Magnificent Failure * *
This app was designed to track the future SkyCube mission, and will be excellent for that. The trouble is that tacking on the ability to fly along with other named satellites is not the same as being able to find a set of otherwise unknown sats to see. A reasonable buy anyway, in the hope that it may be upgraded.
Satellite Safari leverages the code base of SkySafari and is exquisite eye candy, but its useless for tracking satellites. No one knows whats flying overhead, so there is no point requesting sats by name, individually, to discover when they may become visible. The app needs, instead, to tell us what we could see, specifying when and where to look.
A proper satellite tracker creates a list of all the sats to be seen that night, based on user-defined settings for magnitude and elevation (or an algorithm for the number of sats to be seen), and then alerts the user to pending passes while mapping the fly-over. To compare how a satellite tracker should work, try GoSatWatch. It will be obvious that Satellite Safari potentially excels at the mapping, but lacks in all other regards.
iPod owners and anyone who may, someday, be out of range of WiFi and cellular, or anyone who wants to plan observations for a site other than wherever they are at the moment -- you are unwelcome here. There are no provisions for manually creating and storing locations. Depending solely upon Location Services is always sloppy. My WiFi does not locate my iPod, so Satellite Safari thinks Im at the location N 0°0" E 0°0" which I most certainly am not. So, even if the software were designed to be useful, it could not predict any fly-overs for my location!
Much of the information detailing specific satellites is out of date. The International Space Station is described "...as of November, 1998," looking ahead to what are now the long-past milestones planned for what were, back then, future years.
Im amused, not worried. Southern Stars are great programmers. Theyll fix this.
...but it doesnt use the iPhones Compass, so its hard to find what youre looking for.
Strange, as the other great SouthernStars-Apps have this useful Feature...
Downloaded the app. Under Search, there are NO lists, nothing to show any other satellites other than the ISS. Fail.
Said I was on the coast of Niger when I am definitely not anywhere near Africa. Does not adjust to when you zoom in the earth and the inverted feature of the solar system is not good at all. Deleted
Interesting app, but It thinks
Im in the ocean south of Nigeria instead of Eastern Canada. I cant see how to correct it
