Night Sky Planner
Your stellar observation guide
Free · Designed for iPad. Not verified for macOS.
Before you head to a dark site, see what's worth the trip. Night Sky Planner shows tonight's dark window and ranks 200 targets by how high they climb. No signal needed.
Night Sky Planner works out what's worth looking at tonight from your exact spot, and exactly when to catch it. It's for people who actually go out and look. Everything runs on your phone, so it works at the end of a dirt road with no signal and no account.
It starts with your night: sunset, the three twilights, the moment the sky goes properly dark, then dawn on the way back. It also tracks moonrise, moonset, and how lit the Moon is, since that's usually what washes out a faint target.
Then it scores about 200 objects for where you are tonight: the Messier catalog, NGC and IC deep-sky objects, the brighter stars, and the planets. For each one you get when it clears your horizon, how high it climbs, when it peaks, and the stretch of real darkness when it's worth pointing at.
PLANNING THE NIGHT
• Night strip: the whole night on one timeline, dusk through darkness to dawn
• Gantt view: every target you've picked and its window across the night, marked at its highest point
• Best Nights: ranks the coming nights for one object, so you know whether to go now or wait out the Moon
FINDING IT
• POINT ME: hold the phone up and a compass-and-tilt guide walks you onto the target you chose
• A printable finder rose with azimuth and altitude, for setting circles or the naked eye
SEEING WHAT IT IS
• A sky-survey plate for every object, plus the plain facts: type, magnitude, size, constellation
• Thumbnails ship inside the app; tap once to pull the full-resolution plate and keep it for offline nights
MAKING IT YOURS
• Filter by gear (naked eye, binoculars, or telescope) and by object type
• Set location by GPS, or search a place and drop a pin
• A clean share card for the night's list
• Paper and night themes, in a plain monospaced almanac style
• iPhone and iPad, portrait or landscape
PRIVATE, AND IT STAYS THAT WAY
No account, no sign-up, no ads, nothing tracking you, and no server of ours for anything to land on. The motion sensors stay on the phone, and when the sky view uses the camera to help you line up on a star, those frames are read and thrown away on the spot — nothing is photographed or saved.
It does reach the network for four things: an hourly cloud forecast for your spot, which is the one it fetches on its own; a place search, if you type one; Apple Maps, if you open the map picker; and a full-resolution sky-survey plate from CDS in Strasbourg, if you ask for one. Every bit of the astronomy is computed on your phone, so it all still works with no signal.
Set your location and see tonight's list. Clear skies.
Ratings & Reviews
earch and pin any target, save a night's plan, and a sky-view alignment that works in the dark.
- Search the whole catalog by name, and pin targets to the top of tonight's list — pinned objects show up whether or not they pass your filters, with the reason if they aren't up
- Saved plans: keep a night's setup and reopen it later
- Two timelines per target: the hours it's above the horizon, and the narrower stretch when it's genuinely worth observing in real darkness
- The time marker now stays put while you scrub the night strip
- Sky-view alignment holds the camera open at a long exposure, so your alignment star actually registers against a dark sky
- Fixed the night window being anchored to the wrong local noon, which shifted the whole timeline for locations far from Greenwich
Clear skies.
The developer, Bryson Loughmiller, indicated that the app’s privacy practices may include handling of data as described below. For more information, see the developer’s privacy policy .
Data Not Collected
The developer does not collect any data from this app.
Accessibility
The developer has not yet indicated which accessibility features this app supports. Learn More
Information
- Seller
- Bryson Loughmiller
- Size
- 3.8 MB
- Category
- Reference
- Compatibility
Requires iOS 17.0 or later.
- iPhone
Requires iOS 17.0 or later. - iPad
Requires iPadOS 17.0 or later. - Mac
Requires macOS 14.0 or later and a Mac with Apple M1 chip or later. - Apple Vision
Requires visionOS 1.0 or later.
- iPhone
- Languages
- English
- Age Rating
4+
- 4+
- Copyright
- © 2026 Petracore