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Distant Suns Puts The Universe Onto Your iPhone

One of the pioneering educational packages for the consumer market arrives for the iPhone and iPod Touch.

San Francisco, November 3rd 2008 — Award winning astronomy package Distant Suns written by Mike Smithwick of First Light Software is now available at the iTunes AppStore.

Distant Suns will turn your iPhone and iPod touch into a handheld planetarium. It sports a database of thousands of stars, all 88 constellations and the "Messier" catalog of deep-sky objects complete with dozens of photos from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. Using the iPhone's touch screen, users can scroll around the sky and find out what constellations or planets they are looking at with merely the swipe of a finger. This maintains its reputation as one of the most easy to use programs of its type, and one of the most realistic.

Other features include multiple toolbars for instant access to many of the most frequently used functions, the "What's Up?" display to show in a single glance the most important objects in the sky, realistic lunar phases and atmospheric glow from the sun. User's can turn on panoramas from around the world including Lick Observatory in California, the Czech countryside near Prague and the ancient Greek ruins of Khersones in the Crimea.

Author and astronomy instructor, Mike Smithwick, first started working on Distant Suns in 1985, originally releasing it for the Commodore Amiga in 1987. This makes it one of the longest lived consumer software products still actively supported in the marketplace, and certainly the most mature title to be ported to the iPhone. It was later ported to the Macintosh and Microsoft Windows, becoming one of the very first CD-ROM based applications on the market. Under a special licensing agreement, Weather Underground created a web-based version for the astronomy section of their website wunderground.com. Praised by John Dvorak and the Late Sir Arthur C Clarke, DistantSuns is a winner of awards from CES and Home Computing magazine and has been featured on CBS and Newsweek.

When he first started working on the software, Smithwick hoped that one day he would have a device small enough to fit in his shirt pocket that could display the heavens in all its delicate detail. The iPhone made that possible.

In Smithwick's words "the Universe just became smaller, but is just as cool looking."

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