The Stars

Explore the skies above on your Garmin watch or device! The Stars shows you the night sky - planets, sun, moon, constellations, and all stars down the magnitude 4.0. Find the constellations, the planets - whatever is out tonight, or today. This app is very simple: It shows you exactly what stars and celestial objects are up right now, where you are. The app opens looking the direction the watch was pointed when you started the app, with a view of the stars and constellations from the horizon all the way to the zenith. You can then "point and view" anywhere in the sky via 3 different methods (choose in settings) to see whatever you like. Navigate by AIM THE WATCH and START button (3 ways to aim) or Manual Mode (UP/DOWN to move left/right and SELECT/BACK to zoom & move upwards/downwards). Select aim mode in SETTINGS. Details in What's New. PLANETS and the MOON are abbreviated by the first two letters. These are the same abbreviations used in the companion app/widget/watchface THE PLANETS. Full list here: https://github.com/bhugh/ThePlanets/wiki/The-Planets-for-Garmin-%E2%80%90-General-Information CONSTELLATIONS are indicated with their standard 3-letter abbreviations OR full name (select in SETTINGS). The full list is here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IAU_designated_constellations +++MENU OPTIONS+++ Long-press MENU to see the menu & options. Most should be self-explanatory: - Change aim/movement mode (details under What's New) - Change location - Change the time by hours, days, months & years - and choose to go forwards or backwards in time - Show or hide constellation lines - How or hide constellation & planet names - Show Mostly Short or All Long names for planets & constellations. Mostly Short means most constellations & planets are shown with 2-3 letter abbreviations but some at random are shown with full name. The idea is you'll see the long name once in a while, allowing you to learn/refresh constellation names without cluttering the screen too much. All Long shows full constellation & planet names all the time. This can clutter the screen quite a bit. - Make everything darker & bolder (makes text one step larger, constellation lines, stars, planets, etc a bit larger and also drawn with thicker lines) - Reverse the colors STAR POSITIONS are adapted from the magnitude 4 version of the Hipparcos Star Catalog, prepared and formatted by Greg Miller, w/ many emendations to fill out constellations. Planetary & Sun positions are based on Miller's implementation of the VSOP87a PICO algorithm, which is generally accurate to about +/-1.2 degrees for +/-4000 years from the present. https://www.celestialprogramming.com/vsop87-multilang/index.html Moon position & phase are again based on Miller's work: https://celestialprogramming.com/lowprecisionmoonposition.html Note that this "low precision" algorithm gives a moon position within 1 degree of the "High Precision" algorithm for +/- 5000 years from the present.

THIRD RELEASE introduce point-and-look. Just point your watch at whatever you want to see, press START, and you'll see it centered on the screen. - Choose your pointing mode in SETTINGS - SELECT/START button changes view to center whatever the watch is pointing at - UP/PREVIOUS adjusts the view a little up/down - DOWN/NEXT zooms in & out. BACK exits the app. - FOUR WAYS TO POINT, selectable in settings ###1. 6-TO-12 AXIS: Imagine an arrow pointing from the 6 o'clock position to the 12 o'clock position and exiting out the top of your watch. Point that arrow at whatever star or planet you want centered in the view, press START, and it will appear. ###2. 9-TO-13 AXIS: Similarly, imagine an arrow pointing from 9 o'clock to 3 o'clock, point it, press START. Whatever you are pointing at will appear in the center of your screen. ###3. STRAIGHT THRU THE SCREEN: Hold the watch screen up in front of a section of sky, press START, what is directly behind the watch will show as a screen. ###4. MANUAL AIM (as in V2). UP/DOWN move around the point of the compass. SELECT zooms in and then moves the view gradually up step by step to the zenith. BACK reverses back down, then zooms back out, then exits the app. ****SECOND release of THE STARS with some h-u-g-e updates and new functionality of interest to anyone with who likes to observe the night sky, follow astronomy or astronomical and celestial events, or even those who follow astrology for religious or cultural reasons: * SPED UP rendering by a factor of maybe 20X. It now runs quite snappily from screen to screen even on my Instinct 2. * Ability to MOVE BACKWARD AND FORWARD IN TIME. So you can look at the sky TONIGHT or NEXT WEEK. * Ability to CHANGE LOCATION (enter new Lat/Lon) (ver 2.2). * You can go backwards OR forwards in time by HOURS, WEEKS, MONTHS, and YEARS - or even hundreds or thousands of years. * Greatly SIMPLIFIED AND IMPROVED NAVIGATION & moving viewpoint to different directions, zooming in * Option for BOLDER/THICKER/MORE EASILY VISIBLE LINES, TEXT AND OTHER OBJECTS. * When you ZOOM (SELECT Button) you also get another notch higher of thicker/bolder/larger/more visible (on top of the bolder view you get via the menu, if you have that selected). * Option to REVERSE screen colors. This, again, makes the app more easily visible for many people. * All this while actually using LESS memory & resources than V1.0 (!!!). FYI, in general this project presented considerable difficulty: Just the star location data ALONE fills more memory than is allotted to a complete App for most Garmin devices. The constellation shape data is of similar size - ON TOP of that. So fitting all that data PLUS the code needed to render it at reasonable speed on low-powered devices has been a real challenge. Keep in mind that the typical watch has about the storage, processing, and graphics capacity of an Apple ][ ca. 1979. So I consider it something of a miracle that the App works at all, and a MAJOR miracle that it actually works well and rather snappily. This App is a companion THE PLANETS, an app/widget/watchface available on the IQ Store. V2.1 fixes a longstanding/difficult bug with calculating Pluto's position. It should now be accurate for centuries into the past & future. V2.1 Also improved date navigation in the menu, added decade & century increments, and fixed the date display for dates later than 2100 and earlier than 1975, which have to be handled specially because these dates are not handled properly by the watch's built-in routines. V2.11 Added support for the new Instinct devices. V2.2 Added ability change location (menu - choose any Lat & Lon) and corrected an error in Moon location (was in the wrong coordinate system). V3.01 Fixes a display bug in one display mode of V3.0. Approved by Garmin to release app worldwide. V3.1 Auto-exits after 5 mins of no activity, to avoid any possible battery drain. Fix overly large stars.