We've covered Distant Suns before, and we missed the Galilean Nights, but we're giving away 10 copies of Distant Suns [iTunes Link] for your iPhone or iPod touch this week. It's always a good time to have the "universe in your shirt pocket," right? The rules couldn't be simpler (unless we allowed everyone to enter, but promo codes are US-only, sorry) so enter a comment to win!

• Open to legal US residents of the 50 United States and the District of Columbia who are 18 and older.
• To enter, leave a comment below.
• The comment must be left by Saturday, October 31 at 11:59 PM Eastern Daylight Time.
• You may enter only once.
• Ten winners will be selected in a random drawing.
• Prize: Promo code for the Distant Suns app (US$4.99 value).
• Click Here for complete Official Rules.

Star Walk [iTunes link] has been updated and improved with new features that let you leave the earth and look back at our home planet in beautifully rendered views.

Star Walk uses GPS to get your location, and shows you the current sky above your head. Since we last looked at Star Walk the app has added augmented reality, so as you orient your phone to the sky (iPhone 3GS only) you see star maps that show just where you are pointing. You can zoom into any object and get a closeup view of the surface details of planets, or even close-ups of deep sky objects like star clusters, nebulae, and galaxies. You can click on a button and get more info on the object, and if that isn't enough you can connect to Wikipedia for even more.

Star Walk is one of the great demos of Apple technology. Standing out on any clear night, exploring the skies, and easily finding out what you are looking at is a real treat.

I think the earth view is nifty, but frankly, it probably isn't a feature you will use a lot. On the other hand the augmented reality features, the detailed star maps, and close-up images of objects in our solar system are very compelling features.

I still don't like that the app switches to Safari for the Wikipedia info. It would be nice to see the browser built in, but that's a small price to pay for the rest of the deep information provided.

Star Walk works on any iPhone or iPod touch with version 3.0 or later software. The augmented reality feature, as I said, only works on the iPhone 3GS.

At US$4.99 there is a lot to like in this program. Even better, we have ten free licenses to give away to our readers. Here are the rules:

• Open to legal US residents of the 50 United States and the District of Columbia who are 18 and older.
• To enter leave a comment on this post.
• The comment must be left before Monday October 5 at 11:59PM Eastern Daylight Time.
• You may enter only once.
• 10 winners will be selected in a random drawing.
• Prize: One copy Star Walk (Value: US$4.99)

Click Here for complete Official Rules.

Hare are some more screen shots of Star Walk to whet your appetite:

As summer draws to a close for much of the northern hemisphere, try to get outside for some (hopefully) clear skies and a little star gazing.

We've taken a good look at many of the star gazing apps available for the Mac and the iPhone, and I thought it would be fun to try the 'next step', an iPhone app that finds passing satellites and the International Space Station. There are a lot of websites that give you this information, but having it in an app is even nicer.

I've just tried Satellite Visibility [iTunes link], a US$2.99 app that does the job and worked for me the first time out. You tell the app where you are, or let the phone GPS determine your location. You then get a list of all the brighter manmade objects hurtling around the earth that you can see over the next couple days.

If you click on one, you get detailed info on when it appears, when it falls into the earth's shadow, and what direction to look. In addition, you get little sky maps that show where the object will be in a graphic format.

It was partly cloudy here in Arizona last night, but I did locate the International Space Station as it made about a 1 minute appearance in the southern skies before it went behind a cloud bank.

The data for the app comes from a useful website called Heavens Above which has the information that this iPhone app picks up and uses.

The charts are helpful, but the trail of the satellite against the sky is sometimes subtle on the small iPhone screen. Even though I had my GPS radio on, each time I used the app it turned that option off. It does retain your last location, but I think it should just grab the info and not change my settings.

There are other similar apps available for the iPhone, some more expensive; others are free but missing some features that Satellite Visibility has. I think this app has a nice mix for the money.

If all you want is info for passes of the International Space Station, the developer has a US$1.99 app [iTunes app] that skips all the other satellite data.

I think hunting satellites is fun on a nice clear night, so here's a fresh holiday weekend activity you might enjoy.

Click below for a few screen shots:

The Perseid meteor shower should peak tomorrow, August 12, and stay spectacular for a few days after. If you've got the means, I highly recommend you check it out. Quite a show. I'm not sure an iPhone camera would do it justice, but you can prove me wrong by submitting your Perseid meteor shower shots on our TUAW tumblr page. They don't really have to be taken with the iPhone, so if you have a nice telescope, don't be shy.

To celebrate the Perseids we're giving away 25 copies of Distant Suns, a nifty astronomy app for the iPhone and iPod touch (which we've covered before), in one of our patented random giveaways. As usual, this is limited to the US (sorry!), you must be over 18, and so forth. Full rules down below. To enter, just leave us a comment telling us whether you've seen the Perseids.

• Open to legal US residents of the 50 United States and the District of Columbia who are 18 and older.
• To enter leave a comment indicating whether you've seen the Perseid Meteor Shower.
• The comment must be left before Friday, August 14, 11:59PM Eastern Daylight Time.
• You may enter only once.
• Twenty-five winners will be selected in a random drawing.
• Prize: Promo code for one copy of Distant Suns for iPhone, US$5.99 value
• Click Here for complete Official Rules.

Note: The current version of Distant Suns is iPhone OS 3.0-only, but a pre-3.0 version should be available soon.

In this International Year of Astronomy we're seeing a small explosion of astronomy apps updated both for the Mac and the iPhone.

One of my favorites, Distant Suns [App Store] has updated the build that runs on the 3GS iPhone to include some augmented reality features. This means that if you point the phone up to the sky, the program figures out the direction you are pointing and your elevation and slews to the proper view of the star map, giving you a view that should match what you are seeing in the sky.

This greatly enhances the usefulness of this program, especially for novices who want to get outside under the summer stars and quickly figure out 'what's up?'.

This new version is only for 3GS iPhones, and an update with some additional features for all the earlier models is on the way. Of course older phones won't have the compass feature. Other changes include some UI tweaks, and setting the sound effects default to 'off.'

Pocket Universe [App Store], which I reviewed last month, has a similar feature and also works very well. Pocket Universe sells for US$2.99 and Distant Suns is $5.99. Check reader reactions to both and go into details on the features to decide which one is right for you.

Distant Suns has a long pedigree in the star mapping world. It first ran on the Commodore Amiga in 1987, then was ported to the PC, the Mac, and now your favorite cell phone.

When you look up at the moon this summer to celebrate the Apollo 11 landing 40 years ago, be sure to investigate the thousands of other points of light with a software app that will literally point you in the right direction.

Note: Distant Suns runs on the iPod touch as well, but the software will not have the augmentation/orientation feature because the magnetometer isn't present in the iPod touch hardware.

Regular readers will know I'm hooked on astronomy programs, and we've reviewed quite a few in this International Year of Astronomy.

Today only, Carina Software, one of the premier publishers in the field, is giving away Mac, PC, and iPhone versions of their software for next to nothing. It's in honor of today's 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. On the iPhone, they are free, for the PC and Mac version, US$00.01. Note: Due to server overload the Mac and PC versions have been pulled for now. Here is the latest from the Carina website:

"First, our iPhone apps SkyVoyager and SkyGazer will continue to be free downloads from the iTunes app store all day long. No changes there!

At approximately 6:20 AM PDT this morning, we recieved a call from our web-hosting provider, bluehost.com, asking us to suspend the one-cent download offer for our Voyager and SkyGazer desktop software. Demand was so high that our automated serial-number generator, which emails serial numbers to customers, was sending out several thousand emails per hour - putting us in violation of our Terms of Service (TOS) agreement, and causing our email service to be suspended.

Our email has been restored, and we are catching up on our backlog of missing-serial-number emails manually. All customers who have purchased one-cent downloadable copies of SkyGazer and Voyager should recieve their serial numbers from us by the close of business today, Monday, July 20th, 2009.

After continued discussion with our web-hosting provider, it is unlikely that we will be able to continue providing our desktop software as one-cent downloads for the remainder of the day."

I'll focus on the iPhone offerings, in particular the more advanced SkyVoyager [App Store link]. Carina is also offering SkyGazer for free, which is slightly less advanced and has fewer features. I'd go for SkyVoyager at these prices.

OK, what can you do with this software? Well, just about anything to help you under the stars or to plan a night of observing. The software picks up your location from the GPS, and of course the date and time. It will display more than 300,000 stars and 30,000 deep sky objects (clusters, nebula, galaxies). You can see the night sky from any location on earth, and on any date you choose, even going back or forward centuries.

The software also contains NASA images, and work from other astrophotographers. Amazingly, if you have a computer controlled telescope, like a Meade, Celestron, and some other less well known brands, SkyVoyager will soon be able to wirelessly connect to it and steer to objects you select on the iPhone. You can get a complete list of supported scopes here. Note: To make the connection to your scope you'll need a piece of hardware, the Sky-Fi connector, not available until late September. Go to this page for more info.

There are a lot of iPhone/iPod touch astronomy apps out there. SkyVoyager is full featured, and has very deep and complete data bases, especially considering it is running on a phone or iPod touch. It updates comet positions, along with asteroid and satellite orbital data. It requires a WiFi network for these downloads.

The only thing I'd like to see is the ability to use the iPhone tilt/tip sensors and compass to match your sky chart to where it is pointing in the sky. That works really well on Pocket Universe, which I reviewed recently.

SkyVoyager normally sells for $14.95, so free is pretty compelling. Remember, it's today only. My fellow amateur astronomer colleague Steve Sande is reviewing the desktop versions of this powerful software today as well, so be sure to check out his thoughts. They are selling for only a penny, so it's truly an 'astronomical' saving.

Check these screen shots to see SkyVoyager in action:

Over the weekend, we posted information about Carina Software's software giveaway to celebrate the 40th Anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. Today (July 20th) is the day, and for a limited time this morning you could get their two Mac applications (Voyager and SkyGazer) for one cent each. That's right - US$0.01 for each app. The iPhone / iPod touch versions are available for free downloads from the App Store, and my colleague Mel Martin is posting about those apps. The Mac downloads were stopped at 9 AM PDT at the request of Carina's web hosting provider, as the huge number of downloads were overwhelming their available bandwidth.

Mel and I felt it would be a great idea to let TUAW readers get more information about these applications, so we're doing a pair of First Look posts to fill you in on the details. Even if you didn't get the low-cost downloads, you might be inspired by the Apollo anniversary to purchase one of these applications at the usual price. Be sure to read Mel's look at the iPhone apps here.

The two applications have different target audiences. SkyGazer is aimed at the beginning or novice astronomer, and at educators who can use the program to demonstrate astronomical principles. Voyager, on the other hand, is a full-functioned astronomy package for the professional or serious amateur astronomer, and includes such important features as the ability to control computer-driven scopes. Read along for more information about these two guides to the night sky.

On July 20th, 1969, I was an 11 year-old nerd who loved space. Along with billions of other people in the rest of the developed world, I sat in rapt attention in front of the family TV set watching the ghostly figures of Neil Armstrong and Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin taking the first steps on the moon.

Now I'm a nerdy 51 year-old who still loves space. This weekend, my wife and I are celebrating the 40th anniversary of the historic Apollo 11 moon landing by presenting an Apollo retrospective at the Lookout Mountain Nature Center near Denver. If you're in the Denver area, drop by at 7 PM on Saturday, July 18th to learn more about the incredible challenges that were surmounted by the U.S. space program to land men on the moon and return them safely to earth.

For the majority of you who aren't in the Denver area, there's another way you can celebrate on Monday, July 20th, 2009. On Monday, Carina Software will offer free download-only versions of their SkyGazer software for Mac OS X on the Carina website. iPhone and iPod touch owners won't be left out of the fun, as Carina's SkyVoyager app will be free on Monday from the App Store.

Be sure to pass along the information to your friends and join in the free fun on Monday!

[via The Mac Observer]

When the fireworks stop and the smoke clears, it would be a great weekend to look at our beautiful summer skies. Pocket Universe [App Store] is a US$2.99 app that has been updated to make star finding easier for those that have a new iPhone 3GS.

The app uses the position sensors and the compass to orient your phone to match the real sky. As you turn or tilt the phone, the sky map changes to give you a very accurate picture of where you are pointing, with lots of labels and links to more information. This is one of the first examples of an augmented reality app to hit the platform since the introduction of the 3GS.

If you have an older iPhone or iPod touch running OS 3.0, you can tilt the phone to match where the real sky is, but you'll have to manually set the direction you're facing.

This changes everything for the novice astronomer. I tried the feature and it worked really well, even though I was near a large metal building. As I turned my phone the display of the sky changed very rapidly to keep up with my movement.

Other nice features from the last version are intact. You can tap the 'locate' button to find any object that is above the horizon. Select it and it centers on the map. Tap a pop-up for more info and you get a quick summary of the object. In the new version of the app a further tap gets you a Wikipedia entry.

You also get a list of meteor showers, lunar phases and a very nice 'tonight's sky' feature that tells you right away what's up and worth seeing.

Some things I'd like to see improved: The app could support finger-pointing to an object to identify it in addition to going to the locate menu, and the Virtual Sky feature is buried in an options menu. I'd like to see an onscreen button to turn it on and off.

The 3GS features are similar to a Celestron product called the Sky Scout that is a dedicated astronomical instrument. The Sky Scout has a lot more information, and audio tours of the skies, but it costs $200.00. If you're really serious about the stars and planets I'd give it a look.

Meanwhile, another favorite astronomy app, Distant Suns [App Store] has been updated recently, and is now on sale for US$3.99. It has added features to the wonderful tour guides and now includes more information about the objects displayed, including travel time at light speed to the planets. It also includes some breathtaking images from the Hubble Space Telescope.

This is the International Year of Astronomy, so it's a great time to get outdoors and look up. It's fun to do, and the iPhone apps really make it a more compelling and educational experience.

Here are some screen shots of Pocket Universe in operation:

I've always loved astronomy. There is something about the tremendous size and scope of our observable universe that is inspiring and humbling at the same time. It's why I get excited about the variety of astronomy programs for the iPhone.

The latest is called Pocket Universe [App Store link]. For the $2.99US price, your iPhone or iPod touch gets a star atlas of 10,000 objects, a guide to moon phases, a list of what's up on any particular night including meteor showers and any visible planets, as well as live links to astronomy news.

The app also includes an accurate rendering of the positions of the 4 easily visible moons of Jupiter, but your best bet in seeing a planet this time of year is Saturn which is high in the southeast.

As we move toward summer, more and more people will be heading outdoors. That makes it it is a great time to learn the constellations and be able to understand what you are looking at, as opposed to just wondering what that bright thing is.

A nice feature of the app is auto tilt, so when you are pointing the right direction, you can tilt the phone up to get a view higher in the sky and the star map will follow your tilt. If, as rumored, the iPhone adds some kind of direction finding compass, apps like this can be even more helpful as you turn and tilt, as the map should track your movements exactly.

Pocket Universe has a very clever locate feature, where you can select an object, and there are on-screen directions to take you to the object by superimposing arrows on the screen. This feature didn't always work perfectly. I asked the program to find Saturn. It told me to follow the arrows, but no arrows appeared. It seemed to work fine on other objects I was looking for, and Saturn was properly placed on the sky map.

How does this object compare to some of the competition? Quite well. It's reasonably priced, and with the live links it has some features the others don't have. I also recommend Distant Suns, Starmap, and Star Walk as worthy alternatives.

Here are some screen shots:

I admit I have a real love for astronomy and other science apps. Mike Smithwick, the creator of Distant Suns [App Store link] has come up with another winner for the space minded. Grand Tour [App Store link] is a $4.99US application that will let you tour the solar system in very smooth and realistic animations. Named after the NASA Voyager missions* of the '70s that explored the outer planets, Grand Tour will let you move to Mars, explore its two moons, and then shuffle off to Jupiter, Saturn and beyond. The program beautifully renders the starry background accurately, as well as presenting the Milky Way.

The app is loaded with information about the planets and moons, and with a flick of your finger you can rotate the planets and see their relationship to the sun and their satellites in real time. You can also speed up or reverse time, illustrating the orbits of the planets and their smaller companions.

Another nice touch is when you look at the earth, the images of the clouds are in real time (updated every 3 hours) so you are pretty much seeing the real thing in the palm of your hand.

I still marvel at how esoteric iPhone apps are getting. There is truly something for everyone, and the ability to hold a scale model of our solar system and interact with it would have seemed like science fiction a few years ago. Thank goodness Apple decided to bless real apps last year. The experience offered by programs like Grand Tour would really have been lame as a web app.

Grand Tour runs on the iPhone and iPod Touch with OS software 2.1 or greater.

* One of our readers correctly points out that the original NASA Grand Tour missions never happened, because of deep budget cuts. Many of the ideas from the mission were incorporated into the Voyager missions. Thanks for the clarification Mark.

Check out the gallery for some screen shots.

The popular astronomy application Star Walk [App Store link] $4.99 US, has been updated with some new features. You can now see meteor showers on screen, as well as connect to Wikipedia for more information on objects you have selected on the detailed star map.

Star Walk is probably the prettiest of the astronomy guides available for the iPhone and iPod touch. It nicely renders the dense clouds of the Milky Way, and has good visual details of the planets. It also has photos of the Messier objects, which are galaxies, star clusters and nebula.

Star Walk is location aware, so it can match what you see in the sky to what is on screen using the GPS, or you can select from 10,000 cities. You can change your location to anywhere on earth, and manipulate time to look forward and backwards. You could see what the skies were like on your birthday, or even what they looked like centuries ago or centuries ahead.

Things that could be improved would be on screen buttons that take you to the N, S, E, and W skies. The way things work now, you have to drag the map around. When you look up a Wikipedia item, it throws you out of the program. It would be better to build in a web-kit browser so you don't have to launch Star Walk again.

The app has no built in documentation. The company web site has a short PDF with more information. Although the skies in Star Walk are beautiful, most of the skies we see in real life are not. It would be nice to be able to dim the faint stars down to more accurately mimic what we see in the real world.

Nature lovers and amateur astronomers will like this program. Some of the other options at the app store include Distant Suns, [link] at $5.99 US which I have reviewed previously, and Starmap [link] $11.99 US..

Here are some screen shots:

The iPhone can certainly make life easier on a number of levels, and that has greatly increased with the advent of the App Store. There are thousands of selections for every taste, even bad taste. In 2007 Steve Jobs told us web based apps would do the trick, but he finally relented and we all benefited from the tremendous success and variety of the App Store.

So, without further ado, here are some little apps you may have missed that have made my i-life better.

• Backgrounds [App Store link] A nice little app that points you to large collections of wallpaper for your iPhone or iPod touch. You can select a category such as Movies or Nature, and browse away till you find something you like. When you are happy, download the image and it will show up in your camera roll. Do the usual tap, and select it as wallpaper and you are ready to go. The pictures are generally of very high quality, and are sourced from Flickr. The developers claim about 50,000 images are there for the downloading. The app is free, although some unobtrusive ads do show up on the margins of the images. There are a lot of other ways to find iPhone wallpaper, but this is quick, easy and free. I like it.
• Open Table [App Store link] Using your GPS (if your iPhone has one), or simply by giving your location, find the nearest restaurants that have, you guessed it, open tables. Then click on the time you want, and you have a reservation. It doesn't get any easier than that. It works in many U.S. cities, and in London, Toronto and Vancouver B.C. I gave it a go here in Southern Arizona, and found many restaurants with tables available You can set up an account at the Open Table website, but it is not required. Without an account you can select the restaurant, the time you want, and give your name, email, and phone number. Then click on 'confirm' and you are good to go. If you do sign up for a free account with Open Table, you can collect 'Dining Reward Points' when you book a meal at a member restaurant. Collect enough points and you can get some hefty discounts off your next dinner. Open Table also works on the iPod touch. Things that should be added are search by type of cuisine, and I think there should be a direct link to restaurant websites. Open Table is free.
  
• Distant Suns [App Store link] I love to star gaze, and here in Arizona we get about 300 clear nights a year. There are several nice star map programs for the iPhone, but I am very partial to Distant Suns written by Mike Smithwick. This program goes way back to a PC version in 1985, and there have been Mac ports for OS9 and now there is an OS X version. The iPhone/ iPod touch version is scaled down from the big computer versions, but has excellent graphics, location awareness, and does the math to tell you what is visible at the moment and what is not. It is an impressive way to explore the universe above you. Distant Suns is $5.99 and well worth it.

I've always had a fascination with astronomy. Even when I'm not lugging my telescope out to do deep sky work, I'm using my eyes and binoculars to see what's visible in the night sky. Now I can use my iPhone to help me figure out where some of the night objects are -- even when it's light outside.

VITO Technology has just released Star Walk (click opens iTunes), a US$4.99 astronomy app that shows you what's in the sky above. It has an internal database of almost 9,000 objects including the planets, various stars and clusters, and more.

While not for serious amateur astronomers, this is a great tool for anyone who is interested in knowing more about the universe they live in. There's a moon phase calculator, a time machine function to show you what the skies were like or will look like on any day. If you have an iPhone 3G, Star Walk uses GPS to automatically determine where you are on Earth to adjust the view. First-generation iPhone and iPod touch users can select their city from a list.

Star Walk should be a great app for teaching youngsters or yourself more about astronomy.

Starmap 1.1 (iTunes link) is a pocket-sized map of the sky that packs a great deal into a small package.

One thing that strikes you immediately is the challenge of incorporating all the options available into the iPhone's limited UI space. The button panel at the bottom of the screen is a 3D object that you can spin round to reveal more controls.

And you need them, because there's a lot Starmap can show you. Not just the stars and constellations, but also planets, expected meteors and "deep sky" objects like galaxies, clusters and nebulae.

Features I particularly like include: the night-vision mode (tints everything red to minimise your iPhone's own light pollution); the fact that, by default, only objects you're likely to see are shown in lists of stars and planets (you can toggle this on and off if you'd rather see a list of everything, below the horizon or not); and the general feeling that a great deal of thought has gone into building the app from the outset.

The main issue with Starmap, and it's one you'll notice pretty quickly, is speed. Right now, the app does not use any accelerated graphics and subsequently, the frame rate is 3 FPS. Dragging the night sky around beneath your finger is slow and the animation jagged; as a result, it can be a little frustrating to use. Consider this before you buy.

This is a known issue, though, and work is under way on a fully optimised 3D version running at 20 FPS. It might be released as soon as October, we're told.

That (and one or two crashes) aside, Starmap is a fantastic educational app and very good value for the price ($11.99). Existing users should hold out for future updates -- if they deliver what's promised, Starmap will be an almost irresistible purchase.

Oh, and one other thing would be nice: a function that controls the appalling British summer weather, and clears away the almost permanent cloud cover so that we actually have a remote chance of seeing some stars.