The Stars in Your Eyes

Nothing is nicer than laying on a grass lawn at night looking up at the sky and staring at the moon, and if you’re lucky enough to not live in a large city with much light pollution, you would be able to easily see the stars. But unless you are someone who is well versed in the field of astronomy or are very interested and read up about the subject for fun, you will most likely not be able to identify different stars, constellations, or planets. Wouldn’t it be nice to just be able to look up at the sky and find information about all of the different entities without going to a library (or Googling it - no one goes to libraries anymore and it’s sad). To test this out, this week, I tried out the application SkyView which allows you to find and identify planets, stars, and other celestial objects.

The app allows you to find stars, planets, and other objects while looking at the world around you through a phone camera. You simply point the camera up at the sky and it gives you information about the celestial objects you are pointing the camera at. It also has a feature that allows you to search for anything and it then points you in its direction. For example, I wanted to see where the moon (which was already visible to me) was in the sky. The app pointed me into the moon’s general direction, but it was not accurate. We still do have a long ways to go in terms of the accuracy of this technology but it holds so much potential for the future.

If in the future, augmented reality glasses are optimized and become more widespread, it would be amazing to be able to simply look at a star and have information about it. Being able to easily and quickly identify things in the world could change the way we look at the world and would enable us to have so much information at our fingertips. This could lead the entire population to be more intelligent and knowledgeable about many fields of study we neglect today.

This kind of technology would be very helpful and informative when used not only with celestial beings but with other natural entities as well. For example being able to use this technology to identify different species of plants, insects, rocks, animals etc.. Basically anything in the natural world that we as average humans might now very little about.

Another way this could be used is for reconstructing images of demolished buildings or cities that have been destroyed by either natural decay or wars. It would be a whole new way of learning geographical history.

I guess the only thing left for us to do is get our heads out of the clouds and make this into a reality.