Bhagol: Indian Sky Map
Nakshatras, grahas & the sky
Free · Designed for iPad. Not verified for macOS.
Point your phone at the sky and it answers in Sanskrit: which nakshatra you are looking at, which graha, which rashi of the Rashi Chakra.
Point your phone at the sky and Bhagol names what you are looking at — in the sky's own Indian vocabulary, or in the modern one. Two skies over the same stars, and a switch between them.
Not a Western star chart with Sanskrit labels bolted on. Bhagol draws the 27 nakshatras where the source texts put them, the Rashi Chakra against the real stars, and the nine grahas including Rahu and Ketu — the sky as Indian astronomy has described it for three thousand years, over the same stars you can walk outside and see.
THE INDIAN SKY
• The 27 nakshatras, each marked at its junction star (yogatara)
• The Rashi Chakra — the ecliptic with its 27 divisions and all 108 pada syllables, drawn sidereally, following your chosen ayanamsa
• The nine grahas: the Sun, the Moon, the five visible planets, and the lunar nodes Rahu and Ketu
• The horizon with the eight directions, the Lagna and the Madhya Lagna, and the Gol Yantra circles an armillary sphere is built from
WHAT THE TEXTS ACTUALLY SAY
Tap a star and Bhagol shows you the verse it is named in — the Surya Siddhanta, the Satapatha Brahmana, Patanjali — each with its Devanagari or IAST, a published translation, and the edition it came from. A name is a citation, not an assertion. Seventeen of the 27 nakshatra positions were re-seated against those sources rather than inherited unchecked.
THE SKY IN ITS OWN LANGUAGES
Bhagol carries 1,084 star names in 57 languages of South Asia — Tamil, Marathi, Santali, Gondi, Mizo, Sindhi, Kolami and fifty more — each graded by how it is used: the language's ordinary word, a folk name, a tribal name, or one borrowed from Sanskrit. Choose the languages you want and the sky is lettered in them. They do not all see the same figures: Orion is a plough almost everywhere, and three deer with two dogs behind them among the Pardhi, who still hunt. Every name carries the source it was recorded in.
THE MODERN SKY
Switch to the IAU sky and the same stars answer to their catalogues — Bayer, Flamsteed, Hipparcos, Messier — with their distances.
• Exoplanets — the stars known to have planets
• Found from India — discoveries made with Indian telescopes, each citing the paper that announced it
• The invisible sky — radio sources and the radio glow, the H-alpha and infrared skies, and the cosmic microwave background
• Gravitational waves, drawn as the patch of sky each came from, because a wave has no place
• Now in the sky — supernovae worth looking for tonight
• The five Lagrange points — findable, each with who is parked there
• A depth view that stands back from the sky, and a universe scene out to the surface of last scattering
THE REST OF THE SKY
• 2,500 stars to naked-eye magnitude, the 88 constellations and their boundaries, and the Milky Way as the band it is
• The Messier catalogue, meteor shower radiants drawn only while their shower runs, and a gallery of NASA and Hubble images, each findable in the sky
HOW IT WORKS
• Auto mode follows where you point; manual mode lets you drag, pinch and twist the sky by hand
• Time travel — run the sky forward or back, or jump to any date
• Search anything and fly to it; share where you are looking, and the link opens the app there
• Names in Sanskrit, in English, or both together — "Vyadha (Sirius)"
• Night mode, and a compass calibration screen when the phone loses north
Bhagol carries its own astronomy and its own star catalogue, and works without a network — anywhere on Earth, on any date. No account, no sign-in. Three of its records refresh themselves from sky.alokm.com once a day, only while their layer is on, and the app sends nothing about you.
The Hindi interface appears automatically on a device set to Hindi.
Ratings & Reviews
- This app hasn’t received enough ratings or reviews to display an overview.
Sky names in other apps now open Bhagol.
• Tap the nakshatra, the graha or the rashi in the Hindu Calendar app's panchang and Bhagol opens on that object, searched by its name. Until now the tap reached Bhagol's App Store page instead, because nothing in the app had claimed the link
The developer, Alok Mandavgane, 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
- Alok Mandavgane
- Size
- 46 MB
- Category
- Education
- Compatibility
Requires iOS 15.3 or later.
- iPhone
Requires iOS 15.3 or later. - iPad
Requires iPadOS 15.3 or later. - iPod touch
Requires iOS 15.3 or later. - Mac
Requires macOS 12.2 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+
- Contains
Advertising
- Copyright
- © Copyright (C) 2026 Alok Mandavgane