Night Atlas: a free planetarium and Stellina companion for Windows

Tonight's sky, from your town

Night Atlas opens on the sky as it looks from a town you've saved. You enter the town yourself, so it never asks for your GPS location. Drag to look around, scroll to zoom, and click any star to read about it. The planner shows what's up tonight, sorted by how high each object is. It also lists the night's events — eclipses, close pairings of planets, oppositions (when a planet is closest and brightest), meteor shower peaks, and passes of the ISS and China's Tiangong station — and those station passes stay up to date automatically. Pick the objects you want to see, and Night Atlas lists them from highest in the sky to lowest.

Star Camp for beginners and families

Star Camp is a learning game played on that same sky. It asks you to find constellations that are actually up over your town tonight. Flash cards next to the sky give you hints, like the ones kids use to learn multiplication. The cards cover the classic Greek constellations, and you can also turn on a set for the Mazalot, the twelve constellations of the Hebrew calendar. Practice one season at a time, or let it pick a random night. If you'd rather not keep score, Journal mode lets a family learn together without it feeling like a test. Every flash card can also be printed as a black-and-white sheet.

Real photos of galaxies, nebulae, and clusters

Zoom in on a galaxy, nebula, or star cluster and a real photograph of it appears in the sky, behind the trees and horizon. Photos are included for all 110 objects in the Messier catalog, the classic list of bright deep-sky objects, plus about 50 other favorites. Beyond those, the sky holds more than 11,000 objects from the NGC and IC catalogs, the two big professional lists of galaxies, nebulae, and clusters. You can find each one and read about it. Some photos are mine, taken with my Stellina, and others come from NASA, Hubble, Spitzer, and the Digitized Sky Survey (NASA doesn't endorse Night Atlas). These photos come with the app, and the free Photographs pack adds larger versions.

As you zoom in, the photo gets sharper, going from a faint smudge to a detailed close-up, much like moving to a bigger telescope. Click any object to see what it is, how bright it is, and how big it looks in the sky. Objects below your horizon are hidden behind the ground, so you only see what's actually up from your town. Photos you've taken yourself appear alongside the built-in ones in the object's photo gallery.

Your telescope photos, filed for you

Smart telescopes like the Vaonis Stellina take their own photographs, and Night Atlas can put yours right on the sky. Point it to the folder where you keep your pictures, and each time it starts it sorts through them, showing you its progress. Each photo lands on the object you captured, so when you zoom in on the Orion Nebula, your own picture is there. It was built around the Stellina, but photos from other telescopes work too, as long as they're JPG or PNG files named for the object (for example M42.jpg or NGC7000.png).

Photos can be any size; Night Atlas scales each one to 2048 × 2048 pixels for the sky. TIFF files are set aside and not used. When it's done, a short summary tells you how many photos matched, how many didn't, and how many TIFF files it skipped.

Night Atlas can also tell you when an object will next be high enough in a dark sky to photograph from home. You set the minimum height and the hours you're willing to shoot in Settings, and it rates how much the Moon will get in the way.

Printable sheets

Star Camp can save black-and-white PDF sheets to your Documents folder and open them, ready to print. They're handy for a class, a star party, or the kitchen table.

Constellation sheets come in three styles. One shows just the stars and the stick-figure lines. One adds the classic star-atlas drawing and a short version of the old story behind it. The third is a coloring page with the full outline, the constellation's name and nickname, and the time of year it's up. You can print the 12 best-known constellations or the whole set, one per page or two to a page.

Mazalot sheets cover the twelve constellations of the Hebrew calendar, with each one's Hebrew and English name and its month.

There's also a Moon journal page showing the eight phases, and an eclipse sheet with the times for your town.

Using it with a telescope

Plan your night in My night, then click Save list to get a spreadsheet file (CSV) with each object's name, best viewing time, height, and sky coordinates. You can open it in another program, or type the names into your telescope's app in that order. Stellina owners can follow the list in the Vaonis Singularity app.

Coming in Night Atlas Extra: choose your GoTo mount (a motorized mount that finds objects on its own) from Celestron, Sky-Watcher, Meade and others. You'll get setup steps for it, then click any object in the sky to send your telescope straight to it.