Introduction

SkySafari is a celestial travel guide, designed to help you explore the night sky. It is a powerful planetarium program that fits in your pocket, with thousands of stars, planets, and other objects at your fingertips. And SkySafari's Plus and Pro versions can turn your Android device into a 21st-century telescope controller.

SkySafari contains a database with hundreds of thousands - or millions - of stars. It displays the planets and moons of the Solar System using NASA spacecraft imagery, and includes hundreds - or thousands - of asteroids, comets, and artificial satellites.

SkySafari is able to accurately depict these objects in the sky from any location on Earth, and at any time in the past, present, or future. In addition, SkySafari includes informative, plain-English descriptions of the constellations, planets, moons, stars, and deep sky objects. It contains hundreds of images from NASA space missions, the Hubble Space Telescope, and the world's foremost amateur and professional astro-photographers.

For iOS users, SkySafari includes push notifications. With these, you can automatically recieve notifications of celestial events, like eclipses and transits, discoveries of new comets, supernovae, or other product-related announcements.

On iOS, SkySafari also supports Apple's iPad VGA and HDMI adapters. With this adapter connected, your iPad can mirror SkySafari's displays on an external monitor - or a big-screen TV!

SkySafari's simple user interface, combined with its ability to control your GoTo telescope, makes it an invaluable tool for exploring the night sky. We hope you enjoy using SkySafari.

SkySafari Versions

SkySafari comes in three versions:

SkySafari's basic version contains 46,000 stars to 8th magnitude, and the 220 best-known star clusters, nebulae, and galaxies in the sky (the Messier and Caldwell catalogs). It includes images of most Messier objects, and nearly 500 object descriptions.

SkySafari Plus

SkySafari Plus includes 2.5 million stars to 12th magnitude, and 31,000 deep sky objects, including the entire NGC and IC catalogs. SkySafari Plus also contains more than 300 color images of the best known nebulae and galaxies from the Digitized Sky Survey, and more than 1000 object descriptions.

With SkySafari Plus, you can leave Earth and fly into orbit around other objects in the solar system - and even nearby stars - to view them from other vantage points. You can tour Saturn's moons like the Cassini probe, or watch a solar eclipse from the Moon. You can view the Pleiades from afar, or watch the components of Alpha Centauri orbit each other in three-dimensional space. And when you're finished, you can return home to the exact same location you left on Earth.

SkySafari Plus can also point your computer-controlled GoTo telescope anywhere in the sky. To do this, you'll need either our SkyWire serial cable accessory, or a Wi-Fi-to-serial adapter like our SkyFi or Orion's StarSeek Wi-Fi adapter. See the Southern Stars website for more details.

SkySafari Plus also offers higher precision, more sky charting options, observation planning and logging capabilites, and other features of interest to serious observers.

SkySafari Pro

SkySafari Pro contains the same features and functions as SkySafari Plus. But it adds a vastly-expanded database of 15 million stars to 15th magnitude from the Hubble Guide Star Catalog; a deep sky database of 740,000 objects to 18th magnitude from the Principal Galaxy Catalog; and a solar system database of over 550,000 objects - including every known planet, moon, asteroid, and comet.

SkySafari Pro also contains super-high resolution maps of the Earth, Moon, and Mars. With SkySafari Pro's new Moon map, and its ability to show you the view from space, you can watch the Moon orbit below you like an Apollo astronaut.