Redshift - Astronomy App Reviews

have been using it for some time and like it. the graphics of deep sky objects could be enhanced

If your into astronomy, this tool is fantastic, I do recomended it.

This app is wonderful.the graphic are really nice, easy to use,friendly, with a lot of information about the univers i am really happy with this purchase Paul

This along with its ipad counterpart are the best planetarium/astronomy software Ive installed and used to date. Having recently gotten back into astronomy this app allows me to learn about the objects in the night sky and view the planets and their moons in 3D. If your looking for beauty and functionality this is the app for you. But, its missing two key features that I wish it had. 1) Itd be great if I could select an object and find out the next time it will be visible above the horizon during a set time or during normal observable hours ( night time ). As an example Im interested in finding out when Saturn will next be visable above the horizon in my area during a time that I can see it with my telescope. So, itd be awesome if I could input that Im wanting to be out during the hours of 9pm-4am and it would calculate and tell me the next day itd be in view. 2) I know it would make the size of the app larger but Id be amazing if the crators on the moons, major landmarks on the planets, etc. were labelled. Id even be willing to PAY for this feature so that I dont have to keep hopping between apps whenever I want to view the moon or see the landmarks on a planet. Anyways, Thanks for making such a great app and keep up the amazing work.

Have had this app for a long while now, and the details and all the little applications built in are perfectly equiped to enhance our knowledge of the cosmos. Well worth the money.

Best astronomy app on the Mac App Store.

Ive owned and enjoyed an earlier version of Redshift on a Mac, but this one is even better and less expensive too. (Maybe, an opening day sale?) Besides displaying very detailed star scenes and other sky objects (check out the nebula in the Orion constellation, for example) you can turn on background sounds (crickets, frogs, …). Very nice ambiance. Nice detail. Language choices seem to be English and Duetsch. My German is too rusty--so I kept it displaying in English. The pictures shown as the developers examples appear accurate. The 3-D trips are cool--you could spend hours, without boredom, traveling throughout space. I went to the Sun and Mars while writing this. The surface on Mars shown is from actual photographs patched together rather well. Highly recommended application for fun and education!

Great app. Full of features and information. Visuals are stunning. Runs very smooth on my 13 MBP. Definately worth the price.

Great program, little weird to learn, but only took a few minutes. Needs to be updated, there are things mislabeled. For instance, Pluto is labeled as a planet.

I was excited after reading the rave reviews, but my first 5 minutes with Redshift were not pleasant. Just to get it to figure out where I was, I had to go to another website to figure out my coordinates, my city, Austin, Texas, apparently wasnt in their database. I guess, given that, it wouldnt surprise me that no major city in my timezone was in the timezone database (not even Chicago) - so I had to struggle to find somewhere in my timezone, eventually finding somewhere called "Rainy River", wherever the hell that is. Oh, and if you happen to click on the map by mistake during this process, those coordinates you painstakingly discovered and typed in? Theyre gone. I mean, did they even try to use their own software?!

I have been a redshift user sense version 1. I have enjoyed and loved the abillities of redshift. Being in a family full of ham radio operators. Knowing longitude, and latitude coordinates is just second hand. I do know that the database, for cities, stars, nebulas, and deep sky objects is quite vast. The universe is a great void, and our little corners is only a shoe box. How ever this is the first version of it that i owned on a mac. So i am not expecting much. For all of the smart phone users who can not find their location in the database, just look it up on that. I guess to keep it compact for download, they left several features out. Even the windows version that came with a cd, had most of the databases for it. still to have everything it still needed to connect to its server to download the rest of its database. I am hoping that it will be as good for the mac, like it is for the windows version. Nice to see that they piped a version for the mac. If they were to add a download feature to this version like the windows version, itll fix 95% of the problems that the user is having. The windows version updated its database at least once a month, to keep the program updated. This version is a stripped down version of the full blown version. Says itll do RA/Dec. though when selected, it doesnt display em, the only view i got is the path of the planets.

A real shame, I had naively assumed this would of course have retina support. A program like this just screams "moar pixels please". Instead, I feel like I need glasses. I guess my bad for not verifying it on their site.

The Germans invented a marvelous telescope mount called the "German Equatorial Mount" that allows one to find objects in the sky irrespective of time using Right Ascension and Declination. Out of the box, this program provides location in Time+Altitude+Azimuth thus taking astronomy back a century. If there is a way to switch, I have not yet found it. The constellations and other objects are not called by the latin names. For example Virgo is call "Virgin". Its pretty though.

This is fine as a neat "look at stars" app, but as a reference tool its poor. 3 stars because I can extract the information that I want, but it takes forever to do so. Suggestions: allow us to type in numbers for the time and orientation. Do not make us fiddle around with wheels and mouse drags.

Its easy to look past the typical ease-of-use troubles if you care enough about this stuff. Two things would make this a better program. First, a function to do the "3d flight" thing to another object just by clicking on it. If youre centered on Earth and you want to center on Beta Pictoris or something, you can zoom your view in that direction, but its still "centered" on Earth. Click and drag is useless at that point because your target of interest isnt centered. If I want to "go" there, I have to do a search for the thing Im already looking at, just to center on it. A button for "going" to the selected object would vastly improve navigation. Second, a way to really fly around. The description of the entire app is that you get to fly around, but thats not functionally true. You can zoom in and out (resulting in pretty wacky FOV angles), but you cant manually go anywhere. Again, youre stuck going to the giant search thing and looking up a name (sometimes abbreviated beyond the obvious full words, like 55 Cancri is just 55 Cnc, which makes sense in hindsight, but not when youre looking at a blank list of results for "Cancri" or even "Cancer"). Arrow keys or something would be helpful here, so that I can fly around at whatever scale my zoom is showing me. Otherwise, Im happy to own the software, and I look forward to using it more.

All of a sudden this app keeps closing. When can I expect this problem to be fixed?

Well, Redfshift is ruined now. I made the mistake of downloading the asteroid database and now I cant turn them "off." Even with the number of "Solar System" objects set to display the absolute minimum, I have asteroids everywhere, often displayed more prominently than even naked-eye stars. Its a complete mess. Whatever genius decided to "paint" asteroids, which can only rarely be seen with the naked eye at even the darkest sites, brighter than stars you can see from britghtly-lit suburbs should be fired.

With this program I feel like an astronomer that has a space ship to fly around space. Looking at 3D represendation of distant galaxy is fun. It has links to Wikipedia, but I would like to see more options like pictures of recent hubble telescope shots of the things that I see because all the distant stars look like our Solar with different color. More importantly, I would like to see some retina support. The text in the program is making me feel like I need new glasses. I would appreciate an update with Retina Support and options for detail settings. Thank you for a great program to satisfy my curiosity. If only there is something to satisfy the new curiosities that resulted through this program…

I like redshift and have used it since 1989 on an old pentium II windows system and a laptop. I have both the ipad and iphone apps. There is a problem with downloaded date for astroids. The presentation of the objects is to bright and there is no way to deleat the date and revert to the basic data like on the apps. It makes the program almost unusuable. the astroid data ovetakes the stars. It is crying out for a fix. Please! Otherwise I like it very much before I got the down loads. Now it crashes on exit and if zomed too fast. The data is excelent and the graphics wonderful but the new bug is making me use the ipad version. The help screen has no contact info to report problems and the web sight is oriented for windows users. It is a fun app and usefull if you have some experience with a telescope and the night sky. Please fix this problem!! I need a soluton astroids must go..

First of all, this version is prone to crashing. All the time. Secondly, if you want to do anything other than “look” at stars from your location at the current time, you have to pay an additional fee. So if you want to say, look at the stars from the surface of Mars in 2456 BC, that will cost you. Want a larger star catalog? That will cost you. My advice to to go buy some other app that shows the Starry Night.