SkySafari will be on sale during NEAF.
Basic - Free
Plus - $9.99 (iOS and Android); $14.99 (Mac)
Pro - $29.00 (iOS and Android); $39.99 (Mac)
You don't have to be attending NEAF to get these prices. Just go to the appropriate app store Saturday or Sunday (US time).
Here's what we'll be announcing at NEAF w/ regard to SkySafari.
The summer of 2012 is a big one for the solar system - we've got an annular solar eclipse on May 20th, and of course the Venus transit on June 5th. Consequently, the next major update to SkySafari will be a "solar system" release, with features to enhance your ability to explore our solar system.
You'll be able to leave Earth for the first time with SkySafari Plus and Pro. A new "Orbit" button in the toolbar will let you fly to other worlds in our solar system and go into orbit around them. You can tour Saturn's moons like the Cassini probe. You can watch Jupiter's moons cast shadows on Jupiter from below Jupiter's south pole. You can see a total solar eclipse from the Moon. You can view the whole solar system from above, and track the orbits of comets and asteroids in 3D as you orbit the Sun.
And when you're ready to go home, a new "Home" button brings you back to the exact same spot on planet Earth that you left.
We've added a number of slur system graphics improvements. You can now strip the atmospheres off of Venus, Earth, and Titan to see their surfaces unobscured by clouds. Mars's moons are now shaped realistically. Hyperion tumbles chaotically.
The biggest solar system graphics improvement will come in the Pro version. We've included an ultra-high-resolution Moon map based on imagery from the 2009 Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter camera. This is the same imagery that Sky & Telescope used for their brand new Moon globe. It's a vast improvement over our previous low-res Moon map from the 1994 Clementine mission. The new Moon map is over 80 MB of data. And we did a ton of work to make it load smoothly and seamlessly, so you can pan across it or orbit around it, like an Apollo astronaut.
In Pro, we also added new Earth and Mars maps, with 4x the resolution of our previous version's maps.
In addition to the new imagery, all of the planet and moon maps are now labelled (in both Plus and Pro). SkySafari's database now contains over 10,000 names forf every officially IAU-approved named surface feature in the solar system - all the named craters, maria, canyons, volcanoes, and mountains on the Moon, Mars, Mercury, Venus, Io, Europa, etc. are labelled. So are the landing sites of every spacecraft that humankind has ever sent to any other moon or planet. The Apollo landing sites are labelled, as are the impact sites of the discarded lunar module ascent stages and Saturn IV-B boosters. You can even find the Huygens lander probe on Titan!
All of this adds up to such a huge improvement that we've decided to bump the version number to 3.5. The app icon will also get a slightly new look. Best of all, it will be a free upgrade for current SkySafari 3 owners! The corresponding Mac OS X and Android updates will be version 1.5, and will also be free updates for current owners.
