cosmopad

cosmopad

The sky, day by day. An astronomy diary for Android: every evening (or morning) one single thing worth watching with the naked eye, explained with plain text and a drawn sky map, computed for the exact spot where you are.

cosmopad is not a planetarium nor a catalogue: it is a personal astronomer. It doesn't show you everything in the sky, it picks for you the observation of the day: a conjunction, the Moon in a striking phase, a bright planet, a well-placed star, an eclipse, and tells you what time to go out, which way to turn, and what to expect to see. All with the naked eye, no telescope.

What the app does

📖 Almanac
The heart of the app. Choose your place — searching it by name or with the GPS — and cosmopad generates the almanac for the current year: one page per day, opened on today.
Each page contains:
- the date in a large typographic style and the suggested time for the observation (evening at dusk, full darkness, or early morning: the app picks the best moment for that day's event);
- the drawn sky map: the protagonist circled and labelled, its constellation, the Moon with its real phase, the cardinal points and the true horizon profile of your place (hills and mountains included: whatever sits behind a ridge is not proposed);
- a narrative text telling what to watch, how bright it is, how high, and what is near it;
- for the Moon, conjunctions and lunar eclipses, a second, magnified image; every image can be explored with pinch-to-zoom;
- a compass arrow that, holding the phone in your hand, tells you which way to turn ("TURN RIGHT… LOOK THIS WAY").

Pages are browsed by swiping; once you reach December 31st, the following year is generated and you carry on without interruption. Everything is saved to disk: when you reopen it, the almanac is already there, on today's page.

Solar and lunar eclipses visible from your place take precedence over any other event, with times computed against the local horizon (if the maximum happens when the body has already set behind your profile, the app proposes the last usable moment and explains it in the text).

🗓 Calendar
The month grid with a symbol for every day that has something to offer: stars, Moon, planets, conjunctions, and special cells for eclipses (with a flashing border). You change month by swiping — even into another year, which is generated on the fly — and today is highlighted. Tapping a day opens its almanac page.

☽ Journeys
Themed educational paths, to explore a single aspect of the sky day after day. The first is "A month of the Moon": starting from the next first quarter, you follow the Moon for thirty days at fixed hours (one in the evening and one in the morning, adjustable in Settings) and watch it shift, wax and wane from evening to evening. The index is designed to welcome new journeys.

★ Now
A temporary almanac page for the present moment, from the GPS location: one tap and you know what's worth looking at right now. By day it can only be the Sun or the Moon; by night the almanac's editorial criterion applies, but "without memory" (unrelated to the pages you've already seen).

⚙ Settings
Language: English (default) or Italian — changes both the interface and the generated texts, and the almanac is regenerated in the new language.
Notifications: a daily notification at a time you choose, with the day's observation, and/or a reminder a few minutes before the event; you can filter by category (stars, planets, conjunctions, exceptional events).
My places: save several locations with a name, each with its own almanac; one tap to move from one to another.
Appearance: light or dark theme and the text size in the images.
Reset: regenerate just the almanac, or return everything to its factory state (with confirmation).