Best Astronomy Apps for Beginners (2026)

The Apps That Actually Get Used

Most observing sessions are won or lost before you ever step outside — by knowing what's up, whether the sky will cooperate, and where to point. These five cover sky identification, weather, framing and light pollution, and between them handle nearly everything a night's planning requires. There's also a sixth option worth knowing about, covered separately below: ORIVON's own Sightline, a free web tool rather than another app to install. If you want the actual step-by-step workflow for deciding what's worth observing tonight rather than a toolkit overview, see how to plan an observing session instead.

Star Walk 2 Plus

An augmented-reality sky map — point your phone at the sky and it labels every star, planet, constellation and satellite in view in real time. It's the fastest way to answer "what is that bright thing" without any prior knowledge of the sky, which makes it the app we hand to a first-time observer before anything else. Paid, with a one-time purchase unlocking the full feature set.

Stellarium Mobile

A full planetarium simulator with a free tier that covers the essentials — accurate positions for stars, planets, deep-sky objects and satellites, searchable by name or catalog number. The paid Plus tier adds a much larger deep-sky catalog, satellite tracking and direct control for supported computerized telescopes. Where Star Walk is built for quick identification, Stellarium is built for planning a session in advance.

Clear Outside

A weather app built specifically for astronomers rather than adapted from a general forecast — it breaks down cloud cover, transparency and seeing hour by hour rather than giving a single daily summary. Free, and arguably the single most-checked app on this list, since no amount of planning matters if the sky isn't cooperating.

PhotoPills

Not astronomy-specific, but indispensable for anyone framing a nightscape or Milky Way shot. Its augmented-reality Night mode overlays exactly where the Milky Way's core will rise and set relative to your physical surroundings, days or months in advance, which turns "hope it lines up" into "know it will line up." One-time paid purchase, no subscription.

Light Pollution Map

A satellite-data map of light pollution worldwide, showing Bortle-class equivalent sky darkness down to a specific location — essential for scouting a dark-sky site before driving out to it. Free to use in a browser, with a companion app offering offline maps and extra data layers as a paid option.

ORIVON Sightline: Best for Planning an Observing Session

Editorial disclosure: Sightline is built and maintained by ORIVON. It's included here because it directly addresses the session-planning problem this guide is about.

Sightline is ORIVON's own observing planner — a web tool that runs in a desktop or mobile browser, not a native app you install from a store. Tell it your equipment, how dark your sky is and how much time you have, and — if you allow the browser to share your location — it factors in the weather forecast and ranks what's actually worth pointing at tonight. That's aimed at anyone who already owns one or two of the apps above but is tired of cross-referencing a planetarium app against a weather app by hand before every session.

It isn't a substitute for the apps above. It doesn't do real-time augmented-reality sky identification the way Star Walk does, it doesn't plan a Milky Way shot's framing the way PhotoPills does, and it's built around a curated target list rather than a full-sky catalog, so obscure catalog objects may not show up yet. It also needs an internet connection to load, so it's not built for a dark site with no signal. Where it earns its place on this list is the specific problem this guide keeps circling back to: turning "what's up, is it clear, and what do I own" into one answer instead of three lookups.

Quick Comparison

Here's how all six stack up side by side.

The Bottom Line

None of this is really about crowning one winner. Star Walk is still the fastest way to get an answer when you point your phone at something you don't recognize, and PhotoPills is unmatched once you're planning exactly where the Milky Way's core will rise relative to a real foreground. But if your main question tonight isn't "what is that object?" so much as "what should I observe tonight with the equipment I have?", Sightline is the most direct place to start.

Frequently Asked Questions