The 11 Best Astronomy Apps For Amateur Star Gazers

Business Insider - It can be very difficult to identify planets, stars, and clusters at home from your backyard, especially if you are a beginner.

But hey, there's an app for that, of course. Astronomy apps are making it possible for anyone to be astronomer — you don't even need a telescope.

The apps use the GPS and compass in your phone to pinpoint your location and show you where all the surrounding celestial bodies are, even if your view is blocked. Most of the apps don't even need an Internet connection to function so you can take them on camping trips.
Just open the app, point your smartphone at the sky, and the app will identify the planets and stars around you.

We've browsed through some of the top-rated astronomy apps and put together a list of the ones that look the most awesome. Whether you are an aspiring astronomer or just a casual backyard stargazer, these 11 apps can help you locate planets, stars, and galaxies — no telescope required.

SkySafari shows you a map of the sky one million years into the past or future.

 

Mac App Store

App: SkySafari (Buy it for iOS here or Android here)
Price: $4.99

SkySafari can display a map of the sky from any location and shows how positions of celestial bodies change up to one million years into the past or future. It uses images collected from NASA spacecraft and the Hubble Space Telescope to show you the major planets and moons in the solar system. The app also gets you a subscription to SkyWeek: a magazine that tells you about upcoming eclipses and meteor showers.
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Starmap provides a list of suggested celestial bodies to observe each night.

 

App Store

App: Starmap (Buy it for iOS here)
Price: $4.99

Starmap has about 350,000 stars, 150 galaxies and clusters, and 50 asteroids and dwarf planets. The app gives you the "night's best selection" so you know what you should be looking for on any given night and it identifies shooting star zones. This app is also a point and locate that uses the iPhone's compass to identify the planets and stars right in front of you. You can zoom in on a particular object and the app has a night vision mode — the backlight on your phone dims and the images on the screen glow red so your night vision isn't ruined.

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Huge asteroid headed for close encounter with Earth

Photo by: Thinkstock

Asteroid to pass inside moon’s orbit, but scientists see no chance of impact with Earth or moon.

Jerusalem Post - CAPE CANAVERAL – A huge asteroid will pass closer to Earth than the moon on Tuesday, giving scientists a rare chance for study without having to go through the time and expense of launching a probe, officials said.

Earth’s close encounter with Asteroid 2005 YU 55 will occur at 6:28 p.m. EST on Tuesday, as the space rock sails about 201,000 miles (323,469 km) from the planet.

“It is the first time since 1976 that an object of this size has passed this closely to the Earth. It gives us a great – and rare – chance to study a near-Earth object like this,” astronomer Scott Fisher, a program director with the National Science Foundation, said on Thursday during a Web chat with reporters.

The orbit and position of the asteroid, which is about 1,312 feet (400 meters) in diameter, is well known, added senior research scientist Don Yeomans, with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

“There is no chance that this object will collide with the Earth or moon,” Yeomans said.

Thousands of amateur and professional astronomers are expected to track YU 55′s approach, which will be visible from the planet’s northern hemisphere. It will be too dim to be seen with the naked eye, however, and it will be moving too fast for viewing by the Hubble Space Telescope.                  More

Meteor Shower This Weekend

Orionids are most easily seen during the dark hours before sunrise. Twilight Orionids, however, are the most beautiful of all.

Oct. 20, 2011: Earth is about to pass through a stream of debris from Halley’s comet, source of the annual Orionid meteor shower.  Forecasters expect more than 15 meteors per hour to fly across the sky on Saturday morning, Oct. 22nd, when the shower peaks.

Orionids are most easily seen during the dark hours before sunrise. Twilight Orionids, however, are the most beautiful of all.

 

“Although this isn’t the biggest meteor shower of the year, it’s definitely worth waking up for,” says Bill Cooke of the NASA Meteoroid Environment Office. “The setting is dynamite.”

A map of the morning sky on Saturday, Oct. 22nd at 5:30 a.m. local time, viewed facing southeast. Click to view a larger, more complete map.

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Orionids are framed by some of the brightest and most beautiful constellations in the night sky. The meteors emerge from mighty Orion, the shower’s glittering namesake.  From there they streak through Taurus the Bull, the twins of Gemini, Leo the Lion, and Canis Major–home to Sirius, the most brilliant star of all.               More

Brand-New Supernova Spotted Within Hours, Will Be the Most-Studied Star Explosion Ever

New Supernova Type Ia supernova PTF 11kly, 
the youngest ever detected, is seen above over 
three successive nights. The left image, taken Aug. 22, 
shows the event before it exploded supernova, 
approximately 1 million times fainter than the human 
eye can detect. The center image, from Aug. 23, 
shows the supernova at about 10,000 times fainter 
than the human eye can detect. The right image, from 
Aug. 24, shows that the event is 6 times brighter 
than the previous day.  Lawrence Berkeley National 
Laboratory

PopSci - Astronomers just spotted a brand-new supernova mere hours after it exploded, thanks to a robotic telescope and some smart computer algorithms. Now they’re scrambling to use as many telescopes as possible, on Earth and in space, to observe the star’s death throes.

New supernovae are not terribly rare, but this one is unique because it is so close — 21 million light years away — and it’s of a type that is crucial to astronomical measurements. The supernova, PTF 11kly, is the youngest ever detected.

It showed up in the spiral galaxy M101, the Pinwheel Galaxy, a rather large spiral (10 times the size of the Milky Way) located in the constellation Ursa Major, known to its friends as the Big Dipper. It’s a Type Ia supernova, a very bright type that is used for gauging distances among galaxies. The use of Type Ia supernovae as standard candles helped astronomers prove how rapidly the universe is expanding, and led to the discovery of dark energy. So it’s an important type, and the discovery of a super-new, superclose supernova is tantalizing news for astronomers.

The Palomar Transient Factory (PTF) survey, which is designed to observe and discover astronomical events as they happen, spotted the supernova earlier this week, according to a news release from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. First, a robotic observation system mounted on the 48-inch Samuel Oschin Telescope at Palomar Observatory scans the sky, and feeds data to a supercomputer at Berkeley Lab. The computers use machine learning algorithms to comb through the PTF data and flag interesting astronomical phenomena. Within a couple hours of spotting PTF 11kly, the system sent its coordinates to telescopes around the world so others could check it out, according to LBL.                 More