Planets (Pro)

About this app

This nice 3D viewer allows you to explore the Sun and all the planets of our Solar System in high resolution. Imagine you are traveling in a fast spaceship that can orbit the planets and you may look directly at their surface. The Great Red Spot on Jupiter, the beautiful rings of Saturn, the mysterious structures of the Pluto's surface, all of these can now be seen in great detail. All planetary textures are based on NASA elevation and imagery data and on other free resources (such as those of solarsystemscope.com and stevealbers.net), but some colors and shades were tuned in order to make the images clearer. This app is mainly designed for tablets, but it works fine on the modern phones too (Android 8 or newer, landscape orientation).

How it works

Once the application is started (the planets will show up in the centre of your screen and the Milky Way galaxy in the background), you may tap on any planet of our solar system (including Pluto) to see it in greater detail. Then you can zoom in, zoom out or rotate the planet, as you like. The upper buttons let you, in order from the left, to come back to the main screen,  to display some basic information about the currently selected planet, to see a few pictures of the planet's surface or to access the main Menu. Settings allows you to enable or disable the background Music, the Voice, Names, the axial Rotation, the Orbits and the Gyroscopic effect. You can enjoy Planets only for about three minutes per run; if you want to continue the exploration, just download, install and run Planets Pro when the time limit is reached.

Note that the Rotation, Names, Orbits and Gyroscopic effects, if enable, will increase the power consumption of your mobile device (due to the continuous animation) and might slow down the animations.

What's new

The Play/Stop button

It shows the motion of planets along their orbits around the Sun. Although the planets revolve around the sun much faster than they do in reality (one year in about 7 seconds), the ratio between their orbital periods is implemented accurately.

The Day.Month.Year button

This model of the solar system can show the positions of the planets in their orbits at a certain date. Just select the day, month, and year for which you want to see the planetary positions and press OK. A short animation lets you observe how the planets move and their final positions on their orbits.
For example, you can select May 5, 2000, and see a grand alignment of planets. On that date, the Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn had all converged in an area of the sky less than 25 degrees across.
The next time for a grand alignment is September 8, 2040. The 2040 grouping will include Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and the crescent Moon. Clustered well to the east of the Sun, the planets will stage a spectacular show that evening.

Global features

- special software optimization to lower the power consumption

- simple commands - this app is very easy to use and configure

- high definition pictures

- no ads, no limitations (the Pro version of this app)

- the normal version is fully functional for planets, but it has a time limit - about three minutes