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
SkyAR needs your location to calculate what's in the sky above you. You can check your browser settings or set your location manually on a map.
Allow location access for this page in your browser settings:
After changing the setting, tap Try Again below.
Tap the map to place a pin at your location.
SkyAR needs access to your device's motion sensors to work. Without it, the AR overlay cannot track where you're pointing.
Please close this browser tab and reopen the page. When prompted, tap Allow for motion & orientation access.
SkyAR works without camera access, but the experience is much more immersive with the live camera feed as your AR background.
You can allow camera access in your browser settings and reload.
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—I tried to code it myself but put the project in the drawer again while trying to get the sky projection math to work.
🤖 As AI coding became more reliable, I wanted to do a test and see if it could build the app from scratch for me. 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, and 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 for 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
Leaflet.js 1.9.4 — Interactive map (location picker)
OpenStreetMap — Map tiles (minimap & location picker)
OpenSky Network — Live ADS-B flight data (fallback)
ADS-B Exchange — Live ADS-B flight data (primary)
Airlabs — Flight info, route & airline data
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.