About the Book

This book saves you time and effort by reviewing a selection of the best or most useful apps for discovering the universe and following space exploration. It allows you to find your way around these apps and provides usage tips and tricks. You’ll discover planetariums and sky maps, interactive planetary globes and atlases, satellite pass predictors, space flight simulators, and more. These apps will help you observe the sky, spot the International Space Station and artificial satellites, and understand the universe.

The Google Play Store has millions of Android apps for all sorts of application domains and tasks. And there are many great astronomy and space apps buried in there.

For each of the dozens of featured apps you’ll get a summary of what it does, a list of the major features, an overview of the usage, and valuable tips. You’ll also learn whether and how the apps work on Chromebooks and other desktop Chrome OS devices.

Space Apps for Android combines in a single resource information and insight on apps that often come with little or no documentation. It’s your encyclopedia of space apps.

Featured on Google+

The book is based and expands on the author’s Space Apps for Android: Mobile space and astronomy collection that reached over 240,000 followers on Google+ and was featured by Google.

Who The Book Is For

Space Apps for Android is for amateur astronomers, space enthusiasts and anyone with basic familiarity with astronomy and space. It may be useful also to educators as a guide to apps they can use in their astronomy teaching and lab activities.

A Living Book

This book is published as a work in progress based on the Lean Publishing process. As I write more and update the book the price will go up. But if you buy the book the price won’t go up for you and you’ll get for free all future updates. For more information on Lean Publishing and what you get as a reader when purchasing a book in progress see:

• What is "Lean Publishing?"
• Why should I buy an in-progress Leanpub ebook?
• If I buy a book which is in-progress, how does it work? Am I kept current? What about refunds?
• If I buy an in-progress ebook, will I get free updates?

About the Author

Paolo Amoroso

Paolo Amoroso is an Italian astronomy and space popularizer, a Google expert, and a podcaster.

He has been doing astronomy and space outreach and education since the early 1980s, working at the Ulrico Hoepli Planetarium as well as the Brera Astronomical Museum in Milan. The activities he did range from lectures, observing sessions of the sky with Giovanni Virginio Schiaparelli’s historical 8” Merz telescope, guided tours of astronomical facilities and space exhibitions, to teaching astronomy at a Prada Foundation art exhibition.

Paolo wrote the official Italian translation of the training and mission Logbook of ESA astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti and the glossary of her autobiography, Diario di un’apprendista astronauta.

As part of his space outreach activities he has been a co-host of AstronautiCAST, the first Italian space podcast, since its beginning in 2007 and is a board member of AstronautiCAST’s parent organization ISAA, the Italian Space and Astronautics Association.

Paolo has been a member of the Google Top Contributor Program and later the Product Experts Program since 2014. In 2016 Google invited him as a founding member of the Google+ Create program.

See also

• read Paolo's blog
• follow Paolo @amoroso@fosstodon.org on Mastodon