Night Sky

A real constellation prize

Free (with in-app purchases) From iCandi, icandiapps.com Made for iPhone, iPad, Watch Needs iOS 9.3 or later

Here’s a watchOS developer that gets it! Night Sky 4 may be designed for stargazing the heavens above, but the Apple Watch app offers some very compelling reasons to keep your eyes on your wrist, too.

For starters, there’s a complication that notifies interstellar buffs when the International Space Station will next pass over your particular chunk of this planet we call home, which also doubles as a shortcut to launch the app. Do that, and you’ll be asked to align your Watch with the Moon in order to view all the constellations, planets, satellites, and stars in the sky around you.

Should you be unable to see the Moon (during daytime or on cloudy nights, perhaps), you also have the option of getting oriented by compass instead. As with the iPhone app, moving your wrist changes the view of heavenly bodies accordingly in real time, or you can turn the Digital Crown to move forward or backward in time through the nifty “space travel” view.

Last but not least, a deep press on the display provides options to disable tracking or calibrate your view, while lowering your wrist provides a big picture compass view of every celestial body overhead. What’s remarkable is how faithful the watchOS experience is to the iPhone version – as much as is technically possible, anyway.

This is seriously one of the coolest Apple Watch apps around, and better yet, these watchOS features are all part of the free download; a premium subscription for $1.99 per month (or $9.99 annually) adds even more cool iPhone features, including a custom animated view of the sky and a virtual moon tour.

The bottom line. You’ll wish every Apple Watch app was as cool. J.R. Bookwalter