StellarVana: Star Map

Open to a living sky. Identify what's overhead.

StellarVana is an educational star map and celestial reference: the sky above your horizon, IAU constellations, Sun, Moon, and planets, plus eclipse countdowns with honest visibility. Sit with the map. Pan, pinch, and scrub time.

The first screen is the sky itself. Hold-up uses the compass and gyroscope so the drawn map follows how you point your phone — there is no camera viewfinder. Search finds objects. Instruments sit on the map: Tonight, Eclipse, Learn, and Settings.

WHAT MAKES IT DIFFERENT
• Tonight Observe ranks targets for your horizon — twilight, best-now, and Moon-wash (what the Moon will drown tonight)
• Eclipse honesty: local “visible here” versus a global candidate. A miss is not upgraded into a backyard forecast
• Confirmed exoplanet-host stars on the map. The included sky keeps the brightest hosts. A subscription Search also finds famous systems, including TRAPPIST-1 (about 2,000 hosts).
• Instruments on the map, not a tabbed planetarium. Graphics-first Learn — diagrams and Help, not a chat
• Sky math on your iPhone (VSOP87, Meeus, SGP4). ISS TLE age is shown. No account.

SKY MAP
• Live stereographic sky for your location, or a manual latitude and longitude
• Naked-eye catalog (magnitude 5) with all 88 IAU constellation names
• Constellation stick figures on Free (Orion, Ursa Major, Crux, twelve ecliptic); sky colors that follow the time of day
• Hold-up identify and night-vision red mode (night vision hides the normal dome tints)
• Naked-eye Messier highlights: Andromeda (M31), Orion Nebula (M42), Pleiades (M45)
• Deeper sky when you subscribe: about 42,000 stars to magnitude 8, about 120,000 to magnitude 9, zoom level-of-detail, Messier 110, illustrated art on the twelve ecliptic constellations, 6 more constellation figures — Andromeda, Canis Major, Cassiopeia, Centaurus, Cygnus, Pegasus — plus the Summer Triangle, optional IAU boundary lines, and the confirmed exoplanet-host layer (about 2,000)

SATELLITES
• Included: the ISS next pass for your horizon. No clock and no path on the map.
• With a subscription: the ISS path and timetable, Hubble, Tiangong (the Chinese space station), and a Starlink-train card when a train passes tonight. Not every satellite in orbit.

TONIGHT OBSERVE
• Meteor-shower peaks and bright conjunctions as factual event cards
• With a subscription: around each shower's peak, a meteor radiant on the map, plus radiant height, twilight and Moon glare on Tonight's meteor cards and where to hold up your phone. Peak facts, not a local rate forecast
• Observation planning for your horizon: twilight bands, ranked targets, best-now, and Moon-wash — what the Moon will drown tonight

ECLIPSES
• Next solar and lunar geocentric candidates, countdown, diagrams, show on map
• Local circumstance when you subscribe: visible here, magnitude, path-vs-you, and a NASA GSFC / Espenak Earth path ribbon on a dedicated Earth card. A miss is not upgraded into “you will see it.”

LEARN
• Graphics-first topics from the live sky — diagrams and short Help popups, not encyclopedia essays
• Positions use VSOP87 (Sun and planets) and Meeus (Moon). ISS uses SGP4 from a TLE; age is shown.

PRIVATE BY DESIGN
Sky math runs on your iPhone. Location is used to draw your horizon (or set coordinates manually).

EDUCATION ONLY
StellarVana is astronomy education and observation planning. It is not a photographer’s shot planner, and not medical or professional advice.

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Terms of Use: https://stellarvana.com/terms
Support: support@stellarvana.com