I bought myself an iPod Touch for Christmas and am completely besotted with it. It makes me feel like I live in the future. When I was a little girl, I remember watching the original Star Trek series and thinking how wonderful it would be if doors really could open by themselves. Now I have an eight gigabyte micro-computer in my pocket, which allows me to do everything from reading novels without ever turning a page, to playing seriously cool touchscreen games, to listening to music and watching movies.
Our favourite application (“app”) is Star Walk. It cost $5.99 and provides us with an interactive star chart of wherever we are, enables us to watch the movement of objects through the sky with a “time machine” function (which also plots the phases of the moon), allows us to zoom in on stars, constellations, Messier objects and planets, while providing details on them in a Star Wars style pop-up menu, and much more. With it, we’ve been able to figure out when objects will be visible in the night sky and plan our skywatching accordingly. And it’s very user friendly – Small Man recently announced that he’d calculated (sic) when the next full moon would be. Here’s a YouTube clip of the app in action:
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iPod Touch – $329
Star Walk App – $5.99
Feeling like Captain Janeway on the Starship Voyager?
Priceless.
Fig Jam and Lime Cordial 
Hi, I am really glad you are enjoying our app and I want to thank you for the great review – love the ‘Feeling like Captain Janeway on the Starship Voyager? Priceless’. I would like to add a couple of points: price is $4.99 on appstore…isn’t it? And also, here is a scoop, new version is coming out soon, now under revision, and it has major great updates for all of the Captain Janeways out there. So I hope you will enjoy it even more!
Wow, Erika, this is your app? It is seriously wonderful – thank you. It’s $5.99 here in Australia – currency exchange – our dollar is only about 70c to the USD. Really looking forward to the new version, though I can’t see how we could enjoy it any more… :)
My favorite post so far! and the developer found it!!! That’s so cool. My only suggestion is to change the picture to a current generation iPod touch. Just saying… Haha
More Apple posts please :)
Is that better, Tim? :)
Yarb, much better!
ops…price is correct $5.99 for Australia….didn’t know about your precise location. Sorry about it…still worth buying it though :o)
An absolute steal at that price, Erika! We got the big Dobsonian out the other day, and easily found Saturn using Star Walk to help us pinpoint the exact spot in the sky to look at. The $5.99 we spent on Star Walk has made the $600 telescope infinitely more user-friendly.
…and the new updates come free if you already have the app!
In the palms of our hands, yes. In the late ’50s my dad’s computer occupied a two-storey building and took teams of technicians to feed it punched cards. One Christmas it played us a Carol tune after a week of programming & debugging!
It never fails to astonish me how fast technology is developing, although every time I say that, my kids tell me I’m showing my age…sigh… :)