Solar Walk (for iPad)

While the Editors' Choice Star Walk 6 (for iPad) reveals the night sky, including constellations, star clusters, galaxies, nebulae, and planets, another Vito Technology app, Solar Walk (for iPad) ($2.99), focuses on our solar system. It lets you view and scale 3D representations of the Sun, planets, comets, and asteroids, view information on, and (in most cases) images of these objects, and view the solar system (or a planet and its moons) in motion. This impressive iPad app provides a good introduction to the solar system for younger students as well as newcomers to astronomy.

After the app's gorgeous opening screen, showing an artist's view of the inner solar system, the app zeroes in on Earth, showing satellites and their orbits around it, continents, vegetation, clouds, and seas, and the lights on our planet's night side when you rotate it (by sweeping your finger across the screen).

One fun feature of Solar Walk is the time slider along the right-hand edge, coupled with the digital clock at upper right. By setting the clock for minutes, hours, days, months, or years and engaging the slider, you can enable the Earth to rotate (and watch artificial satellites in motion, at least at the slower speeds). If you expand the view by pinching, it will show the Moon in motion around the Earth as well. You can either control the motion by hand, or set the slider in motion by sweeping your finger upwards or downwards and letting go.

Your Personal Transporter
At the screen's lower left is a Search button. It will transport you to other objects: the Sun; the planets (Pluto is included as such); dwarf planets and asteroids (Ceres, Makemake, Haumea, Sedna, Eris, and Eros); and comets (Halley's Comet, Hale-Bopp, Borrelly, and Ikeya-Zhang).

Clicking on the information ("i") icon for a world gives you general information about it, figures (data), some info on the world's internal structure, and a list of science missions to it.

By using the slider and clock, you can set these objects in motion as well, so you could watch, for example, the globe of Mars rotate (surface features are marked, and there's a 3D depiction of the Curiosity rover at Gale Crater); Jupiter's cloud belts rotating, and its four large moons in orbit; or the pear-shaped nucleus of Halley's Comet releasing clouds of gas and dust as it rotates. Expanding the Sun view shows you the planets in motion, although its scale is such that the inner planets vanish when you expand the view to encompass the outer worlds.

Also in Search are tabs marked Satellites, Geography, and Stars. With Satellites, you can zero in on specific Earth-orbiting artificial satellites, the Hubble Space Telescope and the International Space Station (ISS) the most notable of them. Clicking on a satellite name/icon will take you to a close-up view (a detailed 3D representation) of it in space. By rotating a satellite and using the time slider, you can make it seem like the satellite is orbiting the Earth, with the ground, ocean, or clouds passing beneath it. (This works better with the ISS than with smaller satellites.) As with planets and other objects, you can access an information page and image gallery.

We Lost New York
The Geography tab gives you a choice of four worlds: Moon, Mars, Earth, and Venus. Clicking on one gives you a list of features, both well known and obscure, in alphabetical order. Clicking on any of them takes you to the feature's location, where it's labeled on the planet's rotatable globe, as are other features. On the Earth map, most large cities are shown, although there are some notable omissions. For instance, in the United States, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Houston, Chicago, Jacksonville, and Washington D.C. are shown, but New York City, for one, seems to have vanished. Hamilton, Bermuda, Thorshavn, capital of the Faroe Islands, and Longyearbyen on Svalbard are shown, but more notable island cities like San Juan, Puerto Rico, Honolulu or, for that matter, Dublin, are missing.

The Stars tab takes you to selected stars. They're shown in their true colors, more or less; for instance, Sirius is bluish, while Barnard's Star is reddish. They're all depicted at the same size; although you can adjust their distance (and therefore, their apparent size) there's no scale, so you wouldn't know by looking at them Sirius is much larger than Barnard's Star, and Betelgeuse much larger than Sirius). They're all shown as single stars, whereas many are double (as is the case with Sirius) or triple (like Rigel Kentaurus, aka Alpha Centauri). The astronomical data you can call up for each star does indicate which are multiple stars, as well as their mass and radius compared with the Sun?if you know how to read it. And although most bright stars are shown, as well as many fainter ones, once again there are some notable omissions, like the brilliant stars Antares, Rigel, Spica, Deneb, and Canopus (the third brightest star in the sky).

At the top left is a Share button that lets you send a screenshot to email or Facebook, tweet it, save it to camera roll, print it, and rate or gift the app.

The Movies section presents educational animations of some (mostly) basic astronomical phenomena. They include Size Comparison [of worlds], Earth's Cycles, Solar Eclipse, The Moon Phases, Tidal Phenomena, Major Circles of Latitude, Zodiacal Constellations, and Cassini-Huygens. They're brief and basic, but do impart useful information to people new to astronomy.

Solar Walk also runs on an iPhone, with the same basic features and functionality. Though fine on an iPhone, the iPad's more generous screen only serves to enhance the experience.

Solar Walk is not quite as intuitive as Solar System, and its 3D graphics generally aren't as stunning. Both apps have gorgeous image galleries. There are some curious selections and omissions to Solar Walk's geography and star Search features. But the app has some good features, including introductory videos, searches, social media integration, and a more modest price.

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