Guide

How the app is built — from the sky inwards.

+Frames is built around a live sky atlas. This guide is structured the way you meet the app: the atlas behind everything, its toggles, the main card with its tabs — and the cards that open when you pick a target.

The Atlas

A full-screen, GPU-rendered sky map that is always behind everything else.

Gestures

Pan with one finger to look around; the view keeps gliding briefly when you let go.
Pinch to zoom from a 90° wide-field view down to below 1°. As you zoom in, more and more stars appear — the wide view shows the naked-eye sky for your light-pollution level, the deep view goes far beyond it.
Tap a star, planet or deep-sky object to select it and open its card.

What you see

Stars in two layers: a curated catalog of 41,394 stars with full data, plus a deep background layer of about 1.35 million fainter stars that appears as you zoom in.
Star colors follow their spectral class — blue O stars through yellow G and orange K to red M; carbon stars glow a distinct ruby red.
The Milky Way, rendered photorealistically in the background.
Deep-sky objects, the Sun, the Moon (with correct phase), and all seven planets.
Constellation figures with a soft glow and full names (toggle below).
Star names appear automatically — the brightest named stars in view, smoothly fading as you pan.

The Atlas toggles

Small buttons on the right edge of the sky:

● AR — hold your phone up to the sky and the atlas follows your movement, with the camera as background. Great for finding a target with your own eyes.

▭ FOV frame — shows the exact field of view of your active camera + telescope combination as a frame on the sky. If you plan a mosaic, the frame shows the full grid (tiles, overlap, total field and the time factor). With a zoom lens + DSLR setup, a focal-length slider appears — drag it and the frame follows live.

▱ Frame rotation — rotates the FOV frame to your camera angle; the position angle is shown at the frame. Long-press resets to 0°.

EQ — appears only when a smart telescope is selected: switches the frame between equatorial and horizontal orientation, matching how the scope tracks.

✶ Constellations (Big Dipper icon) — fades constellation figures in around the direction you are looking. Deliberately not the whole sky at once, so the view stays calm; lines keep a small gap around each star.

Night vision (eye icon) — turns the entire app deep red to protect your dark adaptation. Persists across launches.

Top left of the sky: Feedback (envelope icon) — send a note to the developer directly from the app.

The Main Card

The floating card at the bottom is the app's control center. It is always there, whatever you are doing:

Status line — the first line always shows where you are looking, live: FOV 2.4° · Alt +34° · Az 156° SE (zoom, altitude, azimuth, compass direction).
Header — your active camera + telescope and the current sampling.
Search & buddy field — one text field for everything: fly to any object by name ("M 42", "Delta Cep", "HIP 110991"), add gear in plain language ("I have a ZWO ASI2600MC Air"), ask planning questions, or send a sky photo for plate solving (with your consent, via astrometry.net): the app identifies the exact field, flies the atlas there — and shows your own photo right in the atlas, at its true position on the sky.
Calendar — the calendar icon opens a month view: swipe through months, tap a day to plan that night (atlas and all cards follow that date), add a note per day. A reset arrow returns to live time.
Tabs — the pill row switches the card's content. Each pill is described below.

Night

Tonight's best targets for your equipment, location and sky.

Top 10 — the highest-scoring deep-sky objects for tonight, each with a grade (A–E), the visible time window, peak altitude and imaging duration. The score weighs altitude, field-of-view fit and moonlight.
Type pills — Galaxies, Emission, Cluster, Planetary, Supernova, Dark, Reflection. Hold and drag to reorder; your order is saved.
Planets — all seven planets with an honest observability verdict. Planets play by different rules than deep-sky objects: bright enough for twilight, moonlight doesn't matter — what counts is altitude and apparent disk size. Mercury and Venus get real twilight windows ("Visible tonight 21:35–22:15 · peak 18°"); a planet not worth observing right now shows the date of its next opportunity instead.
Stars — the brightest and most interesting stars tonight, with sub-pills All · Variable · Double · Carbon:

Variable stars show their current state and upcoming events (maxima of Mira stars, eclipses of Algol-type binaries).
Double stars show separation, position angle, companion magnitude — and a verdict whether your telescope can split the pair under good seeing, or what aperture it would take.
Carbon stars are the deep-red gems of the sky.

Magnitude slider (Stars mode) — sets the faint limit for the star list and the atlas. It can lower the automatic zoom depth, never force more stars than the sky would show.
Bortle slider — preview the sky at a different light-pollution level than your location's.

+Frames

Your projects. Tap the plus on any target to turn it into a project:

Deep-sky projects — the app snapshots your current setup, and you log your captured subs per filter; the project then shows exposure collected, percent complete and total subs.
Star projects — a visual observation log: date, location and instrument are filled in automatically; you add seeing (Antoniadi scale), limiting magnitude, SQM, notes and up to 10 sketch photos. The project counts your observations.
Solar system projects — the Moon and planets become info cards instead of progress cards: no filters or exposure goals, just the live ephemeris — disk size and peak altitude tonight, whether the disk is growing or shrinking, phase (Mercury, Venus, Mars), Saturn's ring tilt, the Moon's age with a hint on what observes well right now, and a dispersion note when the target culminates below 35°. Next opportunity shows the real event: opposition date for the outer planets (with the disk size it will reach), greatest elongation for Mercury and Venus (morning or evening sky), and the Moon's next terminator or full-disc window.

★

Your favorites. Tap the star on any target to collect it here.

Gear

Cameras, telescopes, lenses, mounts, correctors, Barlows, filter wheels, filters, eyepieces and smart telescopes. Combine them into setups and switch with one tap — the FOV frame, the suggestions and all verdicts follow. Sensor data for hundreds of cameras is built in; the buddy can add gear for you.

Location

Your observing site (GPS or manual), its Bortle class and time zone. All visibility windows, twilight times and scores are computed for exactly this spot — anywhere on Earth, both hemispheres. The bottom of the panel lists the data credits.

The Cards

Tapping a target — in the atlas or in any list — opens its card on the main card:

Deep-sky objects — catalog data, tonight's grade, and a 24-hour altitude curve with day/twilight/night bands. Drag along the curve to scrub time: the atlas follows, showing the sky at that moment.

Stars — spectral-class disc, distance, designation. Variable stars show type, period and the next event; double stars the split verdict for your gear. To log observations of a star, add it to +Frames with the plus button (see the +Frames tab above).

Sun, Moon & planets — rise/set times, altitude curve, current distance and apparent disk size, moon phase and illumination — plus a short hint explaining how to observe each planet well.

Data in the app

Deep-sky catalog — 2,961 objects with sizes, surface brightness and imaging difficulty:

Catalog	Objects
NGC	1,723
LBN (bright nebulae)	320
IC	171
SNR (supernova remnants)	149
LDN (dark nebulae)	134
Messier	85
Barnard (dark nebulae)	83
Sharpless (Sh2)	72
Collinder	55
vdB (reflection nebulae)	31
PGC / UGC galaxies	42
others	96

By type: 1,281 galaxies · 586 clusters · 417 emission nebulae · 216 dark nebulae · 181 supernova remnants · 148 reflection nebulae · 123 planetary nebulae.

Stars

41,394 stars with full data — 377 proper names, spectral classes, distances
985 variable stars with type, period and event prediction
9,836 double stars with separation, position angle and companion data
56 carbon stars
~1.35 million additional faint stars in the deep zoom layer
88 constellations, 752 figure lines

Solar system — Sun, Moon and all seven planets with live ephemerides.

Data sources — HYG/AT-HYG star database (CC BY-SA), Washington Double Star Catalog (U.S. Naval Observatory), constellation figures after IAU/Sky & Telescope (CC BY 4.0), Milky Way imagery courtesy NASA/SVS. Full credits in the Location panel.