Distant Suns 5

I've been an amateur astronomer & astronomy writer for over 30 years, and have seen a lot of software for stargazers. Since 1.0 for Windows, Distant Suns has been a great introduction to the sky, and a useful resource for users at any level. Since being ported to the iPhone, it has retained all the virtues of the original, and steadily added functionality while continuously improving the user interface. The developer is clearly committed to supporting users, and at a price that makes this one of the best bargains going. It doesn't quite measure up to Luminos in functionality I personally find valuable, hence the 4 stars, but it does some things Luminos doesn't. I use both regularly.

Updated August, 2018 The last couple weeks Venus, Jupiter, Saturn and Mars have all been in the sky, but Mars has been rising after Venus has been setting (depending on you views of the horizon). I suspected that they may soon converge... Annnnnd thanks to Distant Sun’s “What’Up?” Feature I just scrolled into the future, at 7pm, into September and October and see that mid-September should provide some nights when I/we all can photograph all four planets in the sky. This “What’s Up?” is one awesome feature!!! Thank you, Distant Suns!!!!!! :) Original review: I have had the free version for years. I hesitated on paying because I was not sure that it contained some features. Please know that Distant Suns Max DOES contain 1) position awareness... The screen moves to where you are pointing 2) it can draw the images of the constellations for you (per setting/preference) 3) when you look through the floor/ground it shows you the southern sky 4) it does have a red screen image, to help preserve your night eye sensitivity 5) it will also jump to show you the sky on a date/time you select God bless you, Distant Suns development team! Keep looking up!

This app is a great aid to plan rural night photo shoots. The ability to select future times, dates and set locations is extremely useful. Having used Distant Suns on iPod Touches for several years, I'm even more impressed by the added functions gained on my new iPhone. One caveat: don't enable the iPhone's compass' True North option if you're planning to use the Distant Suns' compass function for point to identify objects in the night sky. The result will be a sky map off by your local magnetic declination.

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Overview: Distant Suns used to be my “go to” app for finding the planets and constellations. Now it’s a confusing mess. More info: When you opened the app, it “just worked.” Now I can’t even figure out how to turn on labels for celestial objects and each time I open the app it pops up an iCloud sync error message (I do not use iCloud and it should not pop this message up every time the app is opened). Once you are able to get through to the sky view, you are presented a sky without labels and without constellation lines, and beneath a group of icons that have no clear bearing on what the features do (except for the compass and lock). I can see that the developer put a lot of work into the 5.0 update, but they went seriously wrong from a UI/UX design perspective.

It's easy to get numb to the magic of technology. But this app can remind you how mind boggling a smart phone or tablet is. This app contains so much graphical, cosmological, and text data, one can ignore how it amazingly uses location, compass, and graphics to reveal the mind-bloggingly big universe. It could use better documentation, for those of us new to astronomy. But click preferences, system, and turn on compass: and viola! Point to the sky and the universe is yours.