apps and portable telescopes to recognize and photograph the sky

On the occasion of the 34th edition of the Nuits des étoiles, which took place this weekend, let’s not forget these apps and connected objects that allow us to study the sky.

Summer is the best season to observe the sky and not just shooting stars. The Night of the Stars, a special moment when up to 10 shooting stars per hour were observed, took place on the weekend of August 10. But, beyond meteors, our mobile phones offer applications that are often free and can help us explore the sky and recognize stars, planets and constellations.

Thanks to the sensors that are standard on most smartphones, dedicated applications can be transformed into smart telescopes. Among these applications, “Carte du ciel”, “Sky Chart” in English, announces 14 million users. The principle is simple. You point your smartphone or tablet, the app also exists for iPad, towards the sky and the application explains to you what you are looking at. In real time, it calculates the position of 125,000 stars, all the planets in the solar system and 88 constellations, night and day.

On the Google and Apple mobile app stores, you will find several other apps on the same principle such as Stellarium, SkyView or Star Walk. Also very fun, applications allow you to locate and watch the international space station pass by, above your head and with the naked eye. It must be said that the ISS is the third brightest object in the sky with its 110 meters long, its metal fuselage and its solar panels. “ISS Live Now”, free and in French, shows where the station is in real time on the planisphere. The application indicates when and at what time the ISS will be visible in the next 20 days, depending on where you are. For example, in France, Sunday August 18, it will be between 6:07 and 6:11 in the morning, for barely four minutes.

And then there’s the consumer telescope that sits on a smartphone. It’s called Hestia. It looks like a big book that you attach to a tripod, but in reality, it’s the equivalent of a real telescope. You place your smartphone on top. The phone will take the photos with the help of Hestia’s built-in 25x zoom. At night, the Hestia app guides the user to aim at the moon and celestial objects using a geolocated sky map to align the telescope. The technology tracks and stacks multiple images to reveal galaxies and star clusters.

Hestia was born as a crowdfunding project on Kickstarter, which raised more than four million dollars, at about 200 euros each. Unfortunately, the sales campaigns around Hestia are over. But given the success, we hope for a successor.