Want to explore the night sky? Two new interactive maps offer very different ways to do it. Skyviewer lets you explore the vast astronomical survey being created by the new Vera C. Rubin Observatory, while Stargazing for Beginners helps you work out what you can actually see in the sky above you.

Skyviewer is an interactive window onto Rubin Observatory’s survey of the cosmos. Located in Chile, Rubin will repeatedly scan the sky for the next ten years, creating an enormous time-lapse record of the changing universe. You can use Skyviewer to explore the results from these scans, navigating around Rubin’s imagery to discover stars, galaxies and other celestial objects.

The experience also includes Skysynth, which turns this visual exploration into a sonified journey through the cosmos.

If Skyviewer is about exploring the universe, Stargazing for Beginners is about exploring the sky above your head. The interactive sky map uses your location and the current time to show what is visible, with a mobile orientation mode that lets you point your phone at the sky to identify objects.

You can speed up time to watch the sky change over hours or days, filter objects by type and limiting magnitude, and search for individual stars and other celestial objects. The map also includes altitude charts, twilight information and a calendar of upcoming astronomical events.

There is even an astronomical events layer showing rise and set times, lunar phases, Moon perigee and apogee, equinoxes and solstices, planetary events and conjunctions, meteor-shower peaks, eclipses and future planetary transits. You can therefore use the map not just to see what is in the sky now, but to find out what astronomical events you might be able to watch in the future.

Maps Mania