The free Planets iPad app provides beautiful 3D, virtual-reality renderings of the Moon and our solar system's eight official planets. The app's sky-map modes help you find these worlds in the sky, at any time in the past, present, and future. The Planets app also adds an interesting educational feature, if irrelevant to the app's themes: maps of the night sky at different wavelengths. It doesn't offer as many objects to explore as similar solar-system apps such as Solar Walk and Solar System, but for what it does offer, the Planets app does an excellent job.
Design and Features
The app has a simple design, and is very easy to use and master. Regardless of the view mode you're in, most of the screen is open to show content, with toolbars at the top and the bottom, and popup menus accessible through two buttons at the top. Three icons at the bottom of the screen control the mode: Sky 2D, Sky 3D, and Globe. The gear icon at the far top right launches an Options menu that lets you change your location and the date and time for the map views, and access a tutorial as well as a video discussing why, in the app's creator's view, Pluto is not a planet. Tapping on the clock icon to the left of the gear icon brings up a Visibility menu showing the rising and setting times of the Sun, the Moon, and the planets. Neptune (invisible to the naked eye) and Uranus (marginally visible to the naked eye) are turned off by default, but you can display them through a setting in the Options menu.
In Globe mode you can choose between nine virtual-reality globes (of the Moon and the eight official planets) to explore. (Sorry, Plutophiles.) The Planets app renders considerably fewer objects than some other solar-system apps such as Solar Walk, Solar System, or Cosmographia , lacking comets, asteroids, and dwarf planets. It also lacks a view in which you can see the planets in motion around the Sun, a feature competing apps offer.
That said, Planets does a beautiful job with the objects it does display. The planets with visible (as opposed to perpetually clouded) surfaces, are created from composites of numerous photos. The VR globes were glitch free in my testing, unlike the Cosmographia app, in which although Saturn's rings were beautifully rendered when we tested it, the planet itself was missing.
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SkySafari 5 Plus (for iPad)
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Solar Walk (for iPad)
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Cosmographia (for iPad)
Sky Guide: View Stars Night or Day (for iPad)
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By default, the planets are spinning. You can tap on each one to stop it, or swipe to the right to speed it up, or to the left to reverse the direction of its rotation. Swiping upward or downward reveals the planet's polar region, which you can stretch to enlarge.
Sky-Map Modes
In Sky 2D or Sky 3D modes, you'll see a map of the sky showing the current position of the planets, and you can reset the time to depict the sky in the past and future, or from other locations on Earth. Both the Sky 2D and Sky 3D maps resemble views in planetarium apps such as SkySafari 5 Plus ($1.99 at Apple.com) , Luminos ($29.99 at Apple.com) , or Sky Guide ($2.99 at Apple.com) , but they are rudimentary in comparison.
The Sky 2D view shows a circular depiction of the entire sky, marked by the four cardinal directions (compass points). In daytime, only the Sun and Moon are visible. In this mode, the icon at the screen's top left is depicted as a compass, and tapping it activates your iPad's internal compass and rotates the view so that the compass points are pointing in their true directions. At night, or if you reset the app's clock, you can see a representation of the visible sky, with the planets, which are shown as photorealistic icons, in their proper places. If you tap on a planet, a box pops up listing the object's rising and setting times, its altitude, and its azimuth (direction relative to north) Sky 2D is at a fixed size, and you can't zoom in.
The Sky 3D view is similar to a planetarium-style app like SkySafari 5 Plus in that it shows the stars and planets visible in the direction in which you point your iPad. The area below the horizon is greened out, although you can still see stars through it. The horizon is the intersection between the green zone and the black sky, and the cardinal directions are marked in blue. The rudimentary star map shows stars easily visible to the naked eye; images of stars and nebulae quickly become pixelated when you zoom in. The planets appear large even in the Sky 3D default view, but when you zoom in this mode, they're positively huge. The realistic planetary photos are pretty, but in either view their ginormousness can make it hard to precisely pinpoint their locations, as was apparent during a recent conjunction of the Moon, Saturn, and Mars, when their small swath of celestial real estate appeared cluttered.
Planets is compatible with both the iPad and the iPhone. I tested it using an Apple iPad Air 2 running iOS 9.3.
Conclusion
The free Planets iPad app shows beautiful, spinning virtual-reality representations of the Moon and the eight officially recognized planets in our solar system. It provides maps showing where to find them in the night sky, and also offers an intriguing feature: the ability to show objects in the sky at a range of wavelengths from microwaves to gamma rays. That said, other solar system apps we have tested—including Solar System, Solar Walk, and Cosmographia—add a wider variety of objects, including dwarf planets, asteroids, and comets. The 3D map view is primitive in Planets is also somewhat compromised by the outsized icons. Nonetheless, this free app is worth picking up for its beautifully rendered globes of the planets.
The free Planets iPad app shows cool VR representations of the planets, depicts their locations in the night sky on a map, and shows what objects are visible at wavelengths ranging from radio to gamma rays.
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