NCP

NCP (North Celestial Pole) provides the essentials for planning your viewing and setting up your equatorial mount telescope, all shown in a dark adaptive App View and a convenient Today View.

The Polar Finder shows the current position of the North Star Polaris when viewed through the finder scope. This is based on your longitude and the current time.

The current date, time, longitude and latitude are also useful for telescope mount configuration. Tap the location to switch between decimal and degrees, minutes, seconds notation.

For planning your viewing, the cleardarksky.com forecast for the site nearest your latitude and longitude shows cloud cover and transparency as a square for each future hour, and is refreshed each time the App is opened. Midnight is shown as a vertical line, usually centered in the dark interval in the thin lower line (indicating where decreased sunlight allows magnitude 3 stars to be seen). The cleardarksky.com site identifier is shown below the forecast for reference. Tap the forecast image to open the full cleardarksky.com forecast page in Safari.