#2275: Stellaugmentation

There are lots of clever apps out there that will allow you to point your GPS-enabled smartphone towards the sky and see a detailed map of what celestial bodies are where.

None however, that I can find, offers the functionality included in today’s invention.

Paolo_Gadler_stars

Instead of doing the standard thing of compressing stars into meaningless, 2-D constellations, the app which I envisage would portray the stars as dots with different diameters.

Closer stars would have a larger diameter.

This would also allow stars at a common radius to be shown on a translucent sphere (perhaps with different colours for each).

It would then be easy to animate the simulated movement in a given direction from sphere to sphere (and thus backwards in time).