Starmap Makes its Debut on iPhone

An independent iPhone programmer, Frederic Descamps, has created a state-of-the-art planetarium program for the iPhone. It took only four months of work in his spare time to get it completed.

Starmap gives you an easy-to-use interface that can help even the most novice of astronomers find what they are looking for. When searching for a specific celestial body, a yellow cursor helps guide the user to the proper area of the sky. The application also utilizes the built-in GPS to determine the user's location for accurate placement of objects.

Starmap comes with 120,000 published objects including the planets and their satellites as well as other objects like galaxies and clusters.

It's also able to supply the rising and setting times of all of the planets, and the map can be modified by the user to include zodiacal signs. The application works equally well in both the northern and southern hemispheres, and the user can quickly pinpoint their location by city.

Additional items in the Starmap application include:

-100 main meteor showers with expected dates, intensities and locations
-150 deep field objects including galaxies and clusters. All with photos
-110,000 visible stars, 250 with name, type and color.
-GPS positions of over 250 cities and GPS auto-location capabilities.
-Night vision mode.

Starmap can also cater to more avid astronomers thanks to its direct database search capabilities which will allow you to pinpoint even the most obscure of the items in the database.

Starmap is available now from the Apple iPhone App Store for $11.99. For more information visit http://itunes.com/apps/starmap on iTunes or http://www.star-map.fr