Over the last few months Google has been really innovating creating some nice applications for their android platform. One of the newest applications is Google Sky Map.
Google Sky Map is a great application for everyone who like to look at the stars and who want to know which star they are watching at. I’ve been using Google Sky Map on the T-mobile G1 and I must say it really impresses me a lot! Due to the internal GPS receiver, the G1 knows what the location is. The digital compas knows in what direction the G1 is pointed at and the G-sensor knows how the phone is tilted. These three aspects are used by Google Sky map to show on the screen exactly where the phone points to. It works amazingly well. When the phone is turned left or right, tilted up or down, the screen displays a different angle of the virtual sky, with all the stars, planets, constellations etc.
When touching the screen a menu appears where it is possible to toggle the view of the Star, Constellation, Messier Objects, Planets, Grid Lines and horizon layers on or off. Touching the screen also shows a zoom in and zoom out button and a button to switch to manual or automatic mode.
Manual mode fixes the screen. Now the internal compass isn’t used anymore and the screen can be dragged to change the orientation. So i f you think the automatic mode is too sensitive, or if the automatic mode just doesn’t work for you, manual mode is a great alternative. Both automatic and manual mode have their advantages so I think it’s great they are both available.
Normally everything mentioned above would make a great application. But Google thought otherwise. They added something special, something where Google is good at: Search.
When pressing the menu button 3 buttons (Search, Settings and About) appear
Search is a really great feature. Sky map gives you the possibility to search for a star, planet or other object in the universe. Lets say we want to find something easy like the moon. The only thing you need to do is push the menu button and tab the search button. Then enter “moon” as searchquery and push the search button. Now a circle with an arrow appears on the screen. The arrow shows the direction where you can find the object you searched for and when you found it, Google Sky map shows that in a really fascinating way. This works both in Automatic and in Manual mode and works amazingly well!
In the Sky map Settings there are various possibilities to enable or disable the view of elements. In the settings it is also possible to set wether the location should be retrieved automatically using the internal GPS-receiver or be set manually by entering an address or latitude and longitude degrees.
Overall Google Sky Map is a great application. With this application Google is really showing off what can be done with its Android Platform and I must say it impresses me a lot. The only improvement I could find is that at startup it could be some quicker, but I belive that an update could solve this easily.
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