Great planetarium program with a few nice touches.

I’ve been using Sky Safari on my iPad for a little over a year, started with 3, then moved to 4. I resisted getting Sky Safari on my Retina Macbook Pro, since I have a couple other planetarium programs that I use. When the new one was announced I decided to try it out.

The first thing I notice is how responsive it is. Panning and zooming around the sky happens at a much faster rate than my other programs (no, I’m not going to name them). Second thing I notice is how easy the interface is to navigate. Each icon has a label underneath, but it’s clear from the icon what each button does. I haven’t tried yet, but I expect that creating observing lists and transferring them to the iPad will be relatively easy (and really, the main reason I got this program, creating observing lists on a small touchscreen is a little more time consuming than I’d like).

Having integrated with Apple Maps (such as they are), and S&T’s Week at a glance are handy, however out in the field will be less useful without WiFi (I use Week at a glance all the time on my iPhone at star parties though!).

I haven’t tried out the telescope integration, but if it’s anything like the iPad/iPhone versions, I don’t expect any issues.

And finally, the developers are very responsive to issues and feature requests. This program is recommended!

Jonas Calhoun about SkySafari 4 Pro