Pocket Stars
from Nomad Electronics

Pocket Stars is an astronomy program for your Pocket PC, Windows Mobile Smartphone, or Windows Desktop PC. It features a highly-accurate graphical star chart and numerous utility features such as a display of the moon’s phases, rise and set times for common solar system bodies, and a very complete celestial navigation package.

An ex-Microsoft developer wrote the program, originally for his own use. It has matured into a commercial product with an enthusiastic following of customers. Users range from sailors to teachers to photographers. What makes this package stand out from the other astronomy programs is a very well thought out user interface, and a very rich set of features.

The star chart is the core of the program. It includes data on over 9000 stars, the sun, the moon, the planets, and the Messier and Caldwell objects. Photographs and extensive reference data are available for most of the objects.

Information on objects includes orbital data and details about the object’s composition and atmosphere. An ephemeris is available that displays the rise, transit and set times for any date.

A display of the moon’s phases provides an animation of the how the moon changes appearance during each month and graphically shows the relationship between the Sun, Moon, and Earth. Little features like this provide excellent educational tools for astronomy novices.

So far, these features are common to most astronomy programs. Pocket Stars stands out, however, in how the features are implemented inside a very intuitive user interface. Tap & hold, drag, and hotspot features abound and act just like you think they should. Would you expect anything less from someone who spent eight years at Microsoft?

We’ve spent many hours discussing the latest GPS programs for our Pocket PC’s. Pocket Stars doesn’t do GPS – instead, it does the complex mathematical calculations that are associated with sextant use. Prior to the availability of portable calculators and computers, determining your position with a sextant required many tedious hand calculations and numerous lookups of data from a book of sight reduction tables.

After recording the data for a few heavenly bodies, Pocket Stars will perform all the calculations necessary to determine you position, and even tell you how accurately the data correlates.

From this, it develops a graph that shows your position and direction to your destination. Makes me wish I still had a sextant!

There are other utility pages for calculating the distance to the horizon, range and bearing calculations, and great circle distances between any two points on earth. This program makes a fine tutorial for beginning (or advanced) astronomers, sailors, or anyone interested in the sky and navigation.

This final image, from the desktop version, shows the orbital paths of the planets, and the sun. This graphically shows where the object will be in the sky over the next days or months. By animating the display, you can easily see when the planets will be visible in your back yard, or you can study the complex paths that they appear to take through the sky. This feature is an outstanding tool for learning about orbital mechanics and should make you really appreciate the genius of astronomers such as Johannes Kepler who developed the laws of planetary motion almost 400 years ago!

Here is a short movie from the developer's website (in WMV format or in Real Format) that demonstrates many of the program’s features. This, in combination with a 15 day free trial and a 30 day money-back guarantee makes this a no risk product.

If you purchase both the Pocket PC and desktop versions, Pocket Stars can synchronize many of the settings between the versions. Pocket Stars is available for $14.95 per platform, with a 20% discount if you purchase both the PDA and desktop versions at the same time. This is an excellent value.

Try or buy the Pocket PC version here. Try or buy the Desktop version here. Remember - buy both, and save 20%!