The Wonder Of Space In An App: The Art Of Star Chart

With recent pics sent back by NASA's Cassini spacecraft showing the earth from 900 million miles away caught through Saturn's rings—plus the popularity of astronaut Chris Hadfield's tweets and space oddities from his sojourn aboard the ISS, along with the adventures of the Mars rover, people's curiosity for all things space is at a high.

Unfortunately for would-be space travelers, even though private space travel will one day soon become a reality, most of us won't get the chance to journey into the cosmos ourselves. But we can experience it another way: virtually. Star Chart is a multi-platform augmented reality app for smartphones, tablets, and the Intel Ultrabook that uses GPS, the compass, gyroscope, accelerometer, and voice control to allow you to peer into the night sky and explore the astral bodies that inhabit it.

The app was produced by San Shepherd and developers Scott Jenkins and David Steptoe, with Neil Kaminski as lead artist. In the video above Kaminski discusses how he translates the majesty and vastness of the cosmos into a "cross-pollination of art, code, and design". So people can do things like journey through the ice particles in the rings of Saturn, or explore a nebula light years across on a monitor 15 inches wide.

For the artwork Kaminski relied both on contemporary images along with more historical ones, using 17th century astronomer and artist Johannes Hevelius' drawings of constellations along with sourcing imagery from NASA—like their cylindrical map of Mars and raw photographs of interstellar dust clouds and then converting them to enhance the app and "Bring space and the wonder I feel about it as an amateur astronomer onto devices such as phones, laptops, and PCs."