A screen shot of Comet Watch's iTunes store page.
Sometimes, it’s hard to remember where constellations are. After all, their positions in the sky change every season. It’s even harder to remember where a comet is — its location changes even faster, putting it in different constellations on different nights. How are you supposed to keep track?
Luckily for you, this is the 21st century, and you don’t have to calculate your own ephemeris for every night-sky object of interest. You can look it up. There is, in fact, an app for that.
It’s called Comet Watch, a free (free!) ISON-centric version of the Distant Suns app. With Comet Watch, you can see where Comet ISON will be every minute of every day. Depending on how much information your brain can take in at a time, you also can turn on icons and images showing where constellations, individual stars, solar-system objects, galaxies, nebulae, clusters, and current targets of SETI research are. Twirl around to any spot in the sky to see what’s up.
To keep you current on comet-related news, Comet Watch also has a news ticker with Astronomy’s latest updates.
To download the app, visit its home in the iTunes store.
It’s free, and you can impress your friends. What more could you possibly ask for?