Mobile Observatory Astronomy

Wolfgang Zima

About this app

Mobile Observatory 3 Pro: your ultimate sky-watching companion. Discover the celestial wonders from your location with the most comprehensive astronomy app available on Google Play Store. Whether you're a casual sky-gazer or a passionate amateur astronomer, this app is a must-have.

With a live, zoomable sky map, you'll know exactly what sky object you're looking at, and you'll have access to loads of detailed information on stars, planets, deep sky objects, meteor showers, comets, asteroids, lunar and solar eclipses, and more. The app offers a photorealistic display of the night and day sky, with a 3D view of the Solar System. You can also get notifications of current celestial events, push events to your phone's calendar, and set reminders.

With an intuitive interface and loads of widgets, Mobile Observatory 3 Pro is the only app you need to stay up-to-date on all things astronomy.

- 45000 stars plus optionally 2.5 mio stars for download
- Photorealistic display of the night and day sky with correctly illuminated landscape. Its the only app on Android which renders the sky physically correct, taking into account atmospheric scattering. Only the real sky is more beautiful...
- Augumented sky view using your device's camera
- 3D-view of the Solar System
- Cardboard viewing of the night sky or the Solar System in 3D
- Map of the Earth showing day and night
- Lots of great widgets for your home screen
- Daily notifications of current celestial events
- More than 60000 Minor Planets with daily updates of orbital parameters
- More than 1000 Comets with daily updates
- Artificial Satellites including the International Space Station (ISS) and all Starlink satellites
- Live mode (point device on sky and get information on what you see)
- Calendar showing detailed descriptions of celestial events
- Push celestial events to your phone's calendar and set a reminder alarm
- Rise, set, and transit times for any object
- Position of any object in the sky (altitude and direction)
- Twilight times, length of day
- 2500 selected NGC objects (galaxies, clusters, ...)
- Messier Catalog (110 objects) complete with images
- Caldwell Catalog (110 objects) complete with images
- Hidden Treasures Catalog (109 objects) complete with images
- Meteor streams (begin, maximum, hourly rate, ...)
- Lunar and solar eclipses information
- Lunar librations, ascending node, maximum declination
- Moon phases, the apparent view of the sun and planets
- Current image of the Sun and sunspot number
- Automatically generated visibility report for any object
- Simulation of light pollution
- Intuitive User Interface: quickly find what you are looking for
- Widget with rise & set times of the Sun and Moon
- Detailed ephemeris, visibility information of all objects
- Dates of conjunctions between any object with planets or the Moon
- Accurate calculations for dates between 1900 and 2100

Ratings and reviews

Very good, complete and capable astronomy app. My only two minor niggles are the on-screen controls are at times a bit small for a phone screen and there's no way to turn off diurnal motion, which means the chart drifts when zoomed in. But that's about it. However there's been no update (as far as I can tell) in 2+ years. Is the developer still active?

Best astronomy app for Android, by far. Excellently and meticulously designed, yet very intuitive. It works well for the amateur as well as the well-seasoned astronomer. It beats even all the much more expensive ones. The Event notifications alone are amazing but I love every other feature it has. Not to mention, it is beautiful to look at. The developers went all the way, no holds barred, on this. Thank you for such a great app.

Many functions (I haven't explored all of them). Clear display with smooth movement/animation. Helpful tips. Only thing that comes close to a fault is that it has to load data every time it boots, but it doesn't take more than about 7 seconds over WiFi. And there are settings that allow you to download many of them preemptively. Not sure how fast the boot/load would go over 4G

What's new

Corrected links to images of the Sun
Fixed crash when accessing the menu in Sky View
Corrected position of the constellation lines