Plan Your Astronomical Observations With Nightshift for Android

Nightshift: Stargazing & Astronomy is one of the best Android apps for planning astronomical observations and assessing visibility conditions.

Home screen of Nightshift: Stargazing & Astronomy for Android on a Pixel 2 XL.
Nightshift: Stargazing & Astronomy on my Pixel 2 XL.

Through a combination of charts and data cards the app shows at a glance the observing conditions on a given night. It provides information on cloud coverage, moonlight, rise and set times, angular altitudes, celestial events, and the visibility of various bodies such as the planets and deep-sky objects. In addition it can compute visibility predictions for telescopes and other optical instruments.

The strength of Nightshift is it effectively presents and summarizes a wealth of relevant data in a clean, simple format that’s quick to scan.

More handy features are coming. The developer, for example, is working to support predictions of conjunctions between the planets, the Moon and bright stars, and so on.

Comments

Post a Comment

All comments are moderated and they are published only if approved by the blog owner. Comments that are spammy, trolling, hateful, malicious, or otherwise inappropriate will be removed without notice at the sole discretion of the blog owner.

Popular posts from this blog

My Favorite Image Annotation Android App

Image
I loved Skitch, the handy little image annotation Android app Evernote discontinued in 2015. It took a while but I eventually found a full replacement that’s even better than Skitch.

Annotate - Image Annotation Tool is a vector image annotation and editing app for Android. It provides drawing tools and shapes that cover the most common annotation needs, as well as a few advanced ones such as highlighting text or image areas and creating magnified insets of specific details. These features are packaged in a clean and efficient user interface that doesn’t get in the way of quick annotations.

Here’s what an annotated screenshot looks like in the app on my Pixel 2 XL phone.


Annotate’s key feature is it’s a vector drawing app, not a bitmap one, which lets you easily edit already created graphical elements such as changing their sizes and positions. This is essential as in most cases working on an image requires some iterations and tweaks before saving the final version.

As a bonus Annotate …
Read more

Feedly's AI Assistant Misses the Point of RSS

Feedly is testing an AI assistant that short-lists selected articles based on user preferences and machine learning.

However, such an algorithmic recommendation feature misses the point of RSS and feed readers, the ability to skim all the headlines of a feed in chronological order. If I wanted algorithms to organize my feeds I might as well use a newsreader like Google News or a social platform like Twitter.

With features like this Feedly is apparently trying to differentiate, attract more users, or pivot. But they’re neglecting the core reading experience. For example, it took Feedly several years to update the Android app and some of its usability issues still have not been addressed. And search, one of the key features of paid plans, is so ineffective I gave up on it long ago.
Read more

Behind the Scenes of Translating Samantha Cristoforetti’s Logbook

Image
From July 2013 to September 2015 ESA astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti posted to her Google+ profile hundreds of entries of the Logbook, a mostly daily journal of the training and space flight for her first mission to space.

The Logbook is a unique resource and public outreach project, likely the most extensive such account by any astronaut. For example, on launch day she shared her thoughts just hours before riding a rocket and blasting into space. No astronaut had ever done that.


Samantha is an European astronaut and, although her home country is Italy, she wrote the Logbook in English for reaching a wider audience. I had the privilege and opportunity of providing the official Italian translation of all the Logbook entries, which were published to the AstronautiNEWS website and later also to ESA’s Avamposto 42 mission website.

Following so closely Samantha’s training and space flight from her direct account was as much an adventure for me as it was living it for her. Here are some be…
Read more