This app needs access to the following sensors of your phone. No data is shared, everything is calculated on your device.
© CC BY-NC Jan Lachauer
Point your device at the sky and look around.
Tap any object to learn more — planes, satellites, stars, planets, galaxies and more await above you.
SkyAR started with a simple question:
where's that plane up there heading? ✈️
I wanted an app that would allow me to point my phone at the sky 🤳 and tell me what I was looking at — but my attempts to code it from scratch failed miserably.
Then AI happened 🤖 and I wondered if it could help me build this. At first it struggled too — the sensor tracking was completely off. But once I told it to use AR.js, things clicked. From there I fell into a vibe-coding rabbit hole 🕳️ and started to add more features, worked on the UX, tested.
The app probably has the worst code quality, but it serves its purpose and tracks not just planes but almost everything in the sky 🌌 As an astronomy fan I've been using Skymap since years 🔭 but it lacks the planes and some info about what I'm looking at. That's why I made SkyAR.
If you enjoy using it, please consider buying me a Ko-fi ☕ — I have monthly server costs to cover. Thank you so much! 🙏
A-Frame 1.6 — WebXR/3D scene framework
AR.js 3.4.7 — Augmented reality for the web
satellite.js 4.1.4 — SGP4 satellite propagation
SunCalc 1.9 — Sun & moon position calculations
OpenStreetMap — Map tiles (minimap)
OpenSky Network — Live ADS-B flight data
ADS-B Exchange — Flight state fallback (api.adsb.lol)
adsbdb.com — Aircraft & route lookup
Celestrak — Satellite TLE data
NASA Exoplanet Archive — Habitable zone planets
Anthropic Claude — AI summaries (Haiku)
Cloudflare Workers & D1 — Proxy & caching backend
Hipparcos Catalog — Star positions & magnitudes
Messier Catalog — Galaxies, nebulae & clusters
Jean Meeus — Astronomical Algorithms — Planet & sun/moon maths
THIS PAGE IS POWERED BY OPENSKY
Matthias Schäfer, Martin Strohmeier, Vincent Lenders, Ivan Martinovic and Matthias Wilhelm. "Bringing Up OpenSky: A Large-scale ADS-B Sensor Network for Research". In Proceedings of the 13th IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Information Processing in Sensor Networks (IPSN), pages 83-94, April 2014.