Skyview

The augmented reality app SkyView (Android) allows the user to see information like the orbits of planets and a brief description of what is being looked at. You can see the locations of the constellations relative to the users position on Earth. It even gives information on a select few stars from other solar systems. One of the coolest features is to see where in it’s orbit a planet will be a specific time of day, relative to the users time zone.

This is cool, but I think that there’s more that could be done with it. What would be cool to add to the app would be more satellites (currently the only satellites are the moon and International Space Station) and comets and asteroids. It would be cool if when looking at a planet, instead of having it just display some brief information on it, it came closer to the user and spun, allowing a 360-degree view of the planet in question, while highlighting interesting features of that planet, if any. Also, I noticed that things are missing. The Asteroid Belt, Kuiper Belt, Oort Cloud. Most people only know of the planets and have no idea about any of those, so if they were to add the Kuiper Belt, etc., it could increase peoples’ space knowledge.

Other data sources that could be added could include a database of comets and asteroids that are displayed in a separate layer than the planets are.

Another layer and database could be used for the satellites. Instead of just having the International Space Station, it could include GPS satellites, communications satellites, and scientific satellites. Obviously military satellites would be excluded.

The ability to explore other solar systems is still lacking. As I previously stated, you can view information on only a select few stars from other solar systems. Either that, or there’s a setting I couldn’t find. This could and should be expanded to be able to select another solar system and then view the components of that system (View the 3 stars and all of the planets that comprise Alpha Centauri). This I feel would be really helpful as most people on Earth can name the 8 planets in our solar system, and Pluto, but not the nearest solar system to ours (i.e. Alpha Centauri).

Also, other galaxies are not integrated. The nearest galaxy is Andromeda, which will collide with the Milky Way in something like 4 billion years. We should at least be able to see some general facts about it.

Another improvement could be to add a database containing the locations and descriptions of objects in space that aren’t known to the average user. This could include pulsars, quasars, black holes, dwarf stars and planets. These aren’t fully understood, but it would be good to integrate them into the app to increase awareness about the array of strange objects in our universe.

Hypothetical locations of hypothetical anomalies like white holes, dark matter and energy would be cool to add, but as there is no absolute proof of their existence, it would detract from the app I feel.

Also, a space junk layer would be cool. To see all of the decommissioned satellites and objects that we have littered the moon with over the past few decades. There’s a lot. Seriously, check out this link https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_artificial_objects_on_the_Moon. Humans are extremely wasteful beings.

Integrating all of these features would improve the app a bit and I feel would make it more informative and useful to the average user. Not all would be easy to implement, but I just expanding on what they currently have would be a good start.