Cosmic Journey Into Space

Start where you are on Earth. Look up at your own sky, choose something in it, and fly there. Every flight is a straight line through one map of the universe, and what you see on the way is what is there. YOUR SKY IS THE STARTING POINT Use your location, or pick a launch site on a map. The sky above you is drawn for this moment: blue by day, stars coming out through twilight, the Moon in its real phase, the planets where they are. A strip shows what is above you right now. Point your phone at the sky, or drag to look around. Keep something in the circle for a moment, or tap it, and it is chosen. Then press Go. FLIGHTS THAT TAKE SECONDS The app sets the pace: about six seconds to the Moon, never more than fourteen to the farthest galaxy. Lift-off and arrival are gentle, and the middle is as fast as it needs to be. One quiet line names the real distances you pass: the edge of space, the Moon's distance, the nearest star. Pause anywhere, look back toward home, and read how old the light from Earth is where you are. THEN GO OUTSIDE AND FIND IT When you arrive, the app tells you where that place is in the real sky over your launch site at that moment: how high, in which direction, whether your own eyes could see it, or when it rises. One tap stands you back on the ground facing it. WORLDS AS THEY ARE Earth, the Moon, Mercury, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn and Neptune wear maps made from spacecraft images, turned the way they really face and lit from where the Sun really is. Look up Europa, Titan or Triton through NASA and they do too. Stars are coloured by their temperature. Black holes bend the light around them. Where a surface is not known, as for Venus under its clouds or any exoplanet, the app says it is a model. A UNIVERSE OF REAL PLACES More than 400,000 destinations work offline: the stars you can see and hundreds of thousands you cannot, 6,344 exoplanets, and 53,914 galaxies at their catalogued distances. Search by name or catalogue number. Leave the Galaxy and the stars thin out to nothing, because that is where the stars are not. Each faint glow ahead is a whole galaxy. SEE WHERE YOU WENT Finish a journey and your route is drawn on a map that is to scale. Flights can differ in length by a factor of trillions, so the map pulls back through each in turn, and its scale bar always says the real length it shows. A journey log keeps the places you have reached. BEYOND THE BUNDLED CATALOG Request more Solar System bodies from NASA JPL Horizons, and distant objects from SIMBAD when a usable distance is known. Results are kept for offline use. Lookups and the launch-site map need an internet connection. Everything bundled works without one. WHAT IS REAL AND WHAT IS NOT Positions, distances, sizes, phases and orientations are measured or computed. Travelling faster than light is fiction, and the app says so while you do it. Star surfaces, ring detail, exoplanets and the shapes of most galaxies are models and are labelled as such. Earth is a smooth globe without terrain or buildings. Sky colours are a display model. Phone aiming depends on your compass. What the app says about your own sky cannot know about cloud, hills or city lights. No account is required. Location and motion access are optional. Your launch site and journeys stay on your device. The original guided journeys remain in the menu.