Bhagol: Indian Sky Map

Alok Mandavgane

Contains ads

About this app

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.

Bhagol is the app that Indian Sky Map became: same maker, same listing, rebuilt.

Ratings and reviews

This is a very good app, please enhance this app similar to the Stellarium app so that the instantaneous position of the sphere, planets, constellations, etc. from the ground can be known, so that it can be known which sphere is located where.

Before directly entering into the sky map....it is better to give an brief introduction about that app...for what purpose it is....& For what we install this app...and what the contents in it... And Make that whole matter ...into various regional languages.......then this app gets very huge response than now... Superb... but illiterate's cannot understand what the inside ...happening while rotating the device ....so give brief intro...in some lang.'s like...English,Telugu,Kannada, Tamil,Malayalam....etc.,

very interesting for an astrologer like me but ayanamsha option is not there for raman which is accurate 100%

What’s new

Two skies over the same stars:

• Switch between the Indian sky and the modern (IAU) one
• Constellation pictures, and figures you can tap and read
• Exoplanets, borders, gravitational waves, supernovae tonight
• The invisible sky — radio, H-alpha, infrared, microwave
• Found from India — discoveries by Indian telescopes
• A depth view, and a universe scene
• 1084 names in 57 sky languages
• Smoother panning, and a wider field of view
• Share where you look; the link opens there