iOS app

Orvex

Point your phone at the sky and see what is up there. Orvex draws stars, constellation lines and planets over the camera, aligned with the compass and refined by matching the stars it actually sees.

Coming to the App Store Privacy Policy
Ko-fi

Orvex is free, with no ads and no data collection. Every sky app I tried was paid or full of ads, so I built this one. Ko-fi keeps the developer account running.

What it does

  • Live sky overlay

    Stars, constellation lines and labels drawn over the camera, moving with your phone as you scan the sky.

  • The whole naked-eye sky

    Over 5,000 stars down to magnitude 6 and all 88 constellations, with proper names, Bayer and Flamsteed designations.

  • Planets

    Mercury to Neptune, computed on your phone from JPL orbital elements. They hide while the Sun is up, as they do in the sky.

  • Alignment that corrects itself

    The compass gets you close; matching the stars the camera actually sees gets you the rest. Drag to fine-tune by hand.

  • Focus on one constellation

    Tap a constellation to dim the others and reveal its fainter members, bright stars first.

  • Offline, in English and Spanish

    The catalogue ships with the app. No account, no connection, nothing sent anywhere.

Requires an iPhone running iOS 26 or later.

Screenshots

The real sky through the camera, labelled.

Orvex showing Orion, Canis Major and nearby constellations over the live camera view of the night sky
Sky
Orvex marking Mars and Jupiter among Leo, Cancer and Lynx
Planets
Orion in focus, with Betelgeuse, Bellatrix, the belt stars and Saiph named
Constellation focus
Canis Major in focus with the slider moved towards fainter stars, revealing more named members
Fainter stars
Fine-tune dialog asking to centre Sirius inside the small ring to adjust north
Fine-tune

Privacy Policy

Orvex does not collect, store, or share any personal data.

The app asks for three permissions, and uses each one only on your phone:

  • Camera. The live feed is shown on screen so the sky can be drawn over it. To refine the alignment, Orvex looks for bright points in the current frame on the device. Frames are never saved and never leave your phone.
  • Location. Your position is used to work out which stars and planets are above you. It is not stored and not transmitted.
  • Motion. The compass and motion sensors keep the sky aligned as you move the phone.

Orvex makes no network requests. The star catalogue ships inside the app and planet positions are computed on the device. The only links that leave the app are the data-source links in Settings, which open in your browser.

No user accounts, tracking, analytics, advertising, or third-party SDKs are used.

If you have any questions, contact:

GitHub Twitter LinkedIn

About the data

The sky catalogue bundled with Orvex is derived from these open sources and shared under the same licence, CC BY-SA 4.0 .

Planet positions are computed from JPL approximate planetary elements; no JPL data files are bundled.