We're glad to announce that SkyMap Free was released for Windows8 platforms.

It can be installed from Microsoft Windows8 store website from this link: http://apps.microsoft.com/windows/en-US/app/skymap-free/3d77692b-caf6-4893-a4a9-c132e08ee747

The popular Windows Phone SkyMap application, downloaded by more than half of million users, now comes to Windows 8!
SkyMap Free is an amazing planetarium for your device. It enables you to point your device at the sky and see what stars, constellations, planets or deep space objects are out there in real time.

SkyMap Free shows the sky in 3D, like you see it at night time exposing a collection of over 110000 stars.

It’s very easy to use for any viewpoint, time and location on Earth: it determines your location automatically, supports pinch to zoom for more details and provides a highly customizable map.

SkyMap Free has a full set of features in order to help both casual stargazers and amateur astronomers to explore and locate the objects in the sky.

Features

Many people asked us the same question for Sky Map application for windows phone: How do we hide the constellation drawings (to avoid showing them on the  sky map)?

The answer is this:

"Please click ... on the bottom right of the screen and then select settings - display - (drag up) - constellation, show art off". Good luck and please let us if you have more questions.

Many users asked us about how to calibrate their windows phone compass. The following video shows how to properly execute the figure-8 calibration

If this doesn't work for you, we found an alternate calibration method - rotate the device on all its axes as presented in this video.

For more details about calibrating the compass sensor, you can take a look here

We released version 2 of SkyMap for Windows Phone.

There are a lot of changes in the new version. The application has a completely new map rendering. It uses XNA, taking advantage of the phone's GPU. All drawings are performed frame by frame, in real time.

Another big difference is the way the application calculates the position of sky objects. We moved from trigonometric formulae to matrix computations. XNA drawing approach is conceptual different compared to the standard Silverlight 2D drawing. Drawing in XNA uses concepts like camera, universe, view, etc... And for that reason, we had to change the application quite a bit. Actually, I can say we completely rewrote the application, reusing only the settings infrastructure from the old one: buttons, ui bars, settings pages, etc.
I really hope that our users will like and appreciate the changes. And we rewrote the application description and created a new video presentation. But unfortunatelly, there was a glitch in the release process because we found a bug in the calibration dialog. We fixed the bug and started a new release (version 2.1).

This our new presentation video:

SkyMap is an amazing planetarium for your windows phone. It enables you to point your phone at the sky and see what stars, constellations, planets or deep space objects are out there in real time.

SkyMap shows the sky in 3D, like you see it at night time exposing a collection of over 110000 stars. It’s very easy to use for any viewpoint, time and location on Earth: it determines your location automatically, supports pinch to zoom for more details and provides a highly customizable map.

Our SkyMap trial application is fully functional (it's just a few steps behind the full SkyMap application: it is ad based and has few small limitations). But we understand there are windows phone users out there not willing to install a trial version - despite the fact there is no price or risk involved.

So, as a solstice summer gift to the world, we've decided to release 2 FREE applications:

SkyMap Free - similar to SkyMap trial version (except the picture of the day feature)

AstroPix - astronomy picture of the day based on apod.nasa.gov website

Here are the application detailed description:

1. SkyMapFree

SkyMapFree provides interactive sky maps for any time, viewpoint and location on Earth. It shows the different names, coordinates, magnitude, astronomical rise and set times plus additional information for over 110000 stars, messier objects, planets, sun and the moon.

SkyMapFree has a full set of features in order to help both casual stargazers and amateur astronomers to explore and locate the objects in the sky:
- interactive zoom
- night mode
- gesture support
- constellations, stars, deep space objects, planets, sun and moon information
- autocomplete search function
- fast loading and initialization
- support for portrait and landscape orientations
- map rotation mode
- point to sky mode (beta)
- flashlight, map orientation lock and other improvements
- help page
- improved sky map graphics: planet images, star colors, diffraction spikes, etc
- sky object information (wikipedia integration)
- new quick settings bar (star density selection, flip map)
- alt/az grid
- additional customizations (show/hide map layers: planets, stars, messier objects, etc)

2. AstroPix

Imagine a beautiful clear summer sky. Look up and discover the beauty of our universe… Have you ever looked through a telescope? Do you enjoy the breathtaking pictures taken from terrestrial or outer space telescopes? Look no further and install AstroPix!
Based on the NASA APOD (Astronomy Picture of the Day) website, Astropix is a friendly daily astronomy picture viewer. APOD features each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer.
The free AstroPix application offers a full set of features, delivering a great integration between the APOD website and the rich and compelling UI of the Windows Phone platform.

AstroPix features:
- Lists the recent pictures published on the APOD website
- Image viewer in both landscape and portrait modes
- Last viewed picture displayed as application background (using panorama control)
- History of viewed images with large thumbnails and description
- Search by name, description or date
- Select a specific date, random date, today, etc
- Image/photograph full explanation and information
- Full screen display
- Image zoom (to small or large dimensions) by pich or double click

We've released version 1 and watched it getting downloaded by a lot of people. Thank you to downloading our app. We also have to thanks all the people who provided feedback and asked for new features.

With so much interest around our SkyMap application, we've decided to already start working on the next version.

But, what's going to be new in the next version of SkyMap?

Without getting in too much details, we already have a list of features postponed from the first version. Additional to that we get user requests by emails to our email address (support at denebsoft.com).

There are a couple of large categories of work items:

- various graphics improvements (for example, I've already added support for star colors on the website - so this change will be ported to the wp7 application)

- a new map visualization mode (the app has now a planisphere view mode - but we'll get prepared for the "point to the sky" feature as soon as Microsoft decides to expose compass API; even if that API is not exposed soon, depending on user requests, we may expose a "hybrid" solution of using a tilt + manual orientation of the map)

- additional settings and features (e.g. flip the map horizontally and vertically, draw celestial equator, etc)

- customizable live tile

The list is long and growing :) But the prioritization process is already in place.

Please send us your feedback and any feature requests that's important for you. We're dedicated to achieve a high customer satisfaction in our products. And thank you again for your interest in our SkyMap for Windows Phone 7 application!

- The original porting of my application (and stripping down the client specific features)
- Find a domain name and hosting solution
- Come up with an optimization for picking the right objects when dealing with a high zoom level
- Create the web interface
- Location support – find location by IP or by a specified address, city or zip code
- Deal with a googlebot issue – it crawled my staging (testing) website “obscuring” my production server
- Determine client local time zone
- Make the size of the skymap customizable
- Display constellation name
- Messier list
- Create customizable toolbar and navigation controls (in javascript)
- Object information and search
- Support for more than 1 million objects from Tycho2 catalog
- Draggable map: use tiles, move all map logic from server to client, actually a complete redesign to support a better user experience
- Moon and planetary data - calculate dinamically their RA/Dec coordinates
- Rise and set times
- 3D effect for sky map borders (use gradients)
- gradients for bright stars (to look like spheres)
- replace gif with png files to support transparency
- label improvements (tranparency and more info)
- Alt/Az and RA/Dec data in labels
- AltAz grid and telrad
- move the website from Montreal to Houston
- clean up the keywords, meta tags, etc
- UI redesign - no more asp.net controls clutter on top - now replaced by expandable menu
- site navigation controls on left side - prepare to add more information and move my astronomy blog on this site
- handle the mousewheel (zoom on mousewheel)
- options to show/hide constellation names and constellation lines
- Share map (sky map links to be shared with friends or saved locally for future use)
- Sky Map (menus and controls) translated to Spanish, German and Romanian (localization based on the browser language)
- publish all 88 Constellations maps (Constellation section of this site)
- crete a site map (to be used by search engines)
- Comments page - users can add comments directly on this site
- HTML5 Sky Map basic implementation - the map is created on the client side and, the overall experience should be better (faster load time, hover support, better zoom experience, etc)
- recognize the constellation trivia game
- Main page tweaks - more stars displayed at high zoom levels
- release of SkyMap for Windows Phone 7 (wp7.aspx page added to this website)

• Dec 2007 – I got a “junk” telescope, a hobby killer from a local supermarket. I had a lot of troubles to find the brightest astronomical target (our moon) and especially to keep it in my field of view; in a few days I got rid of the telescope convinced that the next telescope (if ever) will be a motorized one
• Dec 2008 – got my serious telescope (more details on my astronomy section of my blog) – it was a small goto refractor and I started to enjoy deep space objects; I finally got hooked by the “astronomy” bug
• Jun 2009 – I’ve started to create Spica application - a planetarium software (Windows .NET client application) – I’ve never really released it due to various factors
• May 2010 – Started the implementation of Sky Map Online website by reusing some of my Spica Windows application source code
• Jun 2010 - Finished the first version of Sky Map Online website and had it hosted on a permanent server
• Jun 2010 - present - Different site improvements and development of new features (HTML5 page, constellation data and game, website tweaks, comments page, etc)
• Jan 2011 - Release of SkyMap for Windows Phone 7 application

After we released SkyMap for Windows Phone 7 application and took care of some marketing tasks, we got the chance to set up this blog system for Sky Map Online website.

The plan now is to do some redesign of the main website and move the content of description page to this blog system. We're not sure about the comments page, if that is going to stay on the main site or it will be replaced by the more extensive comments functionality provided on this blog.