Compass Help

If you have an iPhone/iPad or Android device with a compass, SkySafari can show you the sky in same the direction that you're holding your phone. As you move the phone around, the view on the sky chart follows your motion. You can identify stars and planets by holding your phone up next to them, and you can find any object in the sky by following an arrow that points in its direction.

You can activate the compass in two ways:

Tap the Compass button again, or touch any part of the sky chart, to turn the compass off. You can enable or disable the "tilt up to use" compass feaure in the Settings > Field screen in SkySafari (or the Settings > Coordinates view in SkySafari Plus and Pro.) You can turn off "Tilt to Use" if you find that you're accidentally activating the compass too often, or if you prefer to activate it from the main toolbar.

Please note: some devices, like the iPod Touch and Kindle Fire, do not have a compass. The toolbar icon for the Compass will not appear if you're running SkySafari on a device that lacks one. If your device has both a compass and a gyroscope, you can't use them both at the same time: if you turn on the compass, the gyroscope turns off, and vice-versa.

Please note: in SkySafari Plus and Pro, the compass cannot be used when you are orbiting another object in the solar system. You can only use the compass when you are viewing from Earth. See the Orbit button Help for more information.

Using the Compass

SkySafari uses the compass to center the sky chart on the direction you're holding your phone. You can also use it to find objects in the sky. To do this, first turn on the compass/altimeter. Then use the Search view to select the object you are looking for. When the Object Info view appears, tap the Center button at the bottom of view. An arrow appears, leading you toward the selected object. Follow the arrow with your phone to center the object in the field of view. When the object is centered, the arrow disappears, and your phone will be pointing toward the object's position in the sky.

In SkySafari Plus and Pro, the compass and altimeter will be turned off if you connect to a telescope, or lock on the telescope's position in the sky chart. The sky chart cannot be centered on the telescope's position, and centered on the coordinates reported by the compass, at the same time.

iOS Users Please Note: for best results with the compass, turn your phone sideways to landscape mode.

A note on accuracy: the solid-state compass built into most Android devices is not very accurate, and easily affected by interference. It can easily be wrong by ten degrees or more. The compass may be useful for locating bright objects in a general part of the sky, but it's certainly not accurate enough to point a telescope - and definitely not a substitute for the Celestron SkyScout.