Starmap to Great Design

A well-designed starmap is hard to find.

My older daughter has become fascinated with space lately. She's particularly fond of the planets in our solar system (Neptune, is at the top of her list because it's blue) and is soaking up information at the speed of light.

Recently, I was told that Mars would make its closest approach of the year Wednesday night (January 27), and would also be at its brightest. Luckily, my girl had dance class that evening and I was able to pick her up and we walked to a pier on the Hudson to look for Mars.

We were pretty sure we had found Mars in the sky above the Empire State Building, as we shivered in the 37° river wind. But we wanted to check that we had in fact seen the correct bright pink point of light. I searched the web when we got home and found a site called Neave Planetarium. It is the best stargazing map I've seen yet.

The Goods
The Neave Planetarium is based on Flash, which allows a great degree of interactivity in the interface. Neave doesn't overdo it, though. The interactive components of the interface and their design are just about right.

When I wanted to find a starmap, I hoped I would find one that makes it easy to see the celestial bodies without crowding the sky with astronomically wonkish stuff. I had looked before for a starmap and found only outdated static pages with old crappy sky graphics, and kludgy Java applets that plotted sky objects with label-less cryptic symbols.

I had hoped the starmap would have easy-to-use controls where I didn't have to know my latitude and longitude. And I wanted to easily find the starmaps for tonight, as well as August when we are on vacation, and change my map location easily to reflect that different night sky.

Well, Neave delivers on all of these needs.

Neave Planetarium has a beautiful and unobtrusive UI that feels like a night sky, feels "techy," and feels like it's hooked up to some immense and powerful celestial library. In reality, it is only doing just a few things requiring not a ton of data, but it does them extremely well.

The first thing a user should do on entering the Neave Planetariun is to check the fullscreen option on the left. This feature alone beats every other starmap site already. While in the control panel at left, you might as well ensure you are looking at the correct timeframe, either today, tonight, or 6 months from now—it is easy to set the time of your gaze.

Next, at the top right a user can set their approximate location by clicking the "location" menu and clicking their area on the map. If you have a very exact location requirement down to the minutes and seconds of lat/lon, you are too serious a stargazer to use this totally cool site. Go somewhere else, dork.

Now, a user needs to know North, South, East, and West directions where they are in order to make this useful. Otherwise, you won't find anything in your real sky.

To move around the Neave sky takes a little getting-used-to, and is based on clicks and mouse motion. Test and get used to the movement by trying it out a little. The way it works is one click in the sky releases it to move, and it will move in the direction the user has moved the mouse cursor. Another click stops the sky where it is. Once you get used to it, you'll be fine. Just remember that to move the sky takes two clicks, a start-moving click and a stop-moving click.

To learn about the objects in the sky, mouse over them. A mouseover of a star tells a user the star's name, what constellation it's in, how bright it is, and how far away. In brightness, smaller numbers are brighter (even negative numbers).

To learn more about planets, mouseover them and learn the planet's name, brightness, and distance. For all celestial bodies in these starmaps, their perceived color is represented as well. Mars is bright pink, Venus bright white, and stars of various colors and brightnesses.

Something I found to be a lot of fun is using the date & time panel to make the sky move. Click and hold down on the up or down arrows for the time minute control, and watch the sky move through the night into dawn. Or click the up or down arrow on the day number control to watch the sky change through the year.

The Good and the Improvable
There's not a lot more to this web app, unless I'm missing some other huge piece of functionality. What really attracts me to this app is how well it works, and part of the reason for my excitement is how well-designed the user interface is.

Simple, smart, gets out of my way. These qualities define a good experience for me with an interface. The only two notes I would have about the interface are that the movement of the sky takes a little bit of effort to learn, and might have included some more intuitive controls as an alternative to the mouse gesture control. The other feature I'd like to see is a bit more information about the celestial bodies.

While Neave supplies information when a sky object is moused-over, I keep wanting there to be more information available with a click. This is not the behavior of the app.

Other than those minor gripes, I think this is a really fantastic app, and a very well designed interface. Go try it out!