The Night Sky

This past weekend, when I retreated to New Jersey, I found myself doing the thing city dwellers can't seem to help but do when we leave our metropolis—craning my neck up to the night sky, commenting on how many stars there were to be seen. One night by the campfire, we could see one particularly bright star and debate began over whether it was a star or a planet.



I remembered hearing about the Google Sky Map app during a work assignment awhile back (at the time, I couldn't figure out why people would use it), so I downloaded it to see if it could end the planet vs. star debate. It turned out to be so much (nerdy) fun! You just point your phone at the sky and it tells you the constellations (and more) that you're seeing. It even has a "time machine" feature that lets you see what the sky will look like the next day, what it looked like the night before, and even the night of Apollo 11. Of course, we all laughed that the app was making us look at my phone instead of up at the pretty stars :)

Oh, and in the planet vs. star argument, it turned out the planet camp was correct. It was Jupiter!

Images via weheartit and lifehacker. This is not a sponsored post, I just really liked the app.