Bhagol

The sky does not move when I turn the phone

The app has two modes. In auto mode the sky follows where you point; in manual mode you drag it around by hand. The button at the top switches between them, so the first thing to check is that you are not in manual.

If you are in auto and nothing moves, the phone may have no rotation sensor, in which case the app falls back to the accelerometer and magnetometer — steadier on some phones, jumpier on others. You can force that path with Disable gyroscope in settings, which is worth trying on a phone whose gyroscope drifts. Sensor damping on the same screen trades responsiveness for steadiness.

Everything is pointing the wrong way

That is the compass, not the sky. Open Calibrate compass from the menu and wave the phone in a figure of eight until the accuracy reading turns green, standing away from anything magnetic — car dashboards, laptop speakers and magnetic cases are the usual culprits.

If it is consistently off by a fixed angle rather than wandering, check Magnetic correction in settings. It is on by default and adjusts for the difference between magnetic and true north where you are, which in parts of the world is several degrees.

It does not know where I am

Location is optional and the app never insists. If you declined the permission, or the device has not produced a fix yet, open Location and search for a city by name — the list is inside the app, so it works with no network at all, as does everything else the app does. The three records that can refresh themselves — what India's telescopes have found, what is in the sky tonight, where gravitational waves came from — simply keep the copy they have until a network is there.

To go back to automatic, use Use my location on the same screen. The app only ever asks for approximate location, which is as precise as a sky map needs.

These are not the star names I know

By design: the app opens on the Indian sky, labelled in its own names, because that is the sky it was built to show you. There are two ways to the names you know. Tap IAU on the switch at the top of the sky and the same stars answer to their catalogues — Sirius, Orion, M42, with their distances — and the instruments' layers come with them. Or stay in the Indian sky and open Names in settings: Script chooses how its own names are written, and Both gives "Vyadha (Sirius)", one to learn from the other.

This setting is about the names of things in the sky. The app's own buttons and menus follow your device's language, in English or Hindi.

The sky is showing the wrong date

You are probably still in time travel. Open Time travel and tap Now, and the sky returns to the present. The panel shows the date it is currently drawing at the top, which is the quickest way to tell.

A meteor shower I was expecting is not on the sky

Radiants appear only when their shower is actually running, plus the ten days before it starts, when the marker is drawn dimmed. The older app drew all ten all year, which meant ten labels claiming ten showers when nine of them were months away.

If you want to see one out of season, travel to its date in Time travel and it will be there — search finds it then too.

Where are the comets?

Removed on purpose, and I would rather explain than pretend. A comet layer is only worth having if it can find comets, and the interesting ones are newly discovered — a list compiled into the app can only ever show a handful of faint periodic ones, several of them beyond any telescope you own, while missing every bright comet that actually arrives.

It comes back when the app can fetch real orbital elements rather than carry a fixed list. The old app's version of this feature had shown nothing since 2021.

Some nakshatras sit on different stars than they used to

They do, and it was deliberate. The old positions came over from the original app unchecked; seventeen of the twenty-seven have been re-seated against the source texts. Most moved by a star within the same group — which of the three Arietis is Bharani, whether Punarvasu is Castor or Pollux — but Ardra moved from Alhena to Betelgeuse, which is thirteen degrees, and follows both Burgess's reading of the Surya Siddhanta and the Sardulakarnavadana.

If you work from a tradition that places one differently, write to me — I would genuinely like to know which, and what it follows.

I updated from Indian Sky Map and want my old setup

It is the same app and the same listing — renamed, and rewritten from the ground up. Your location, gyroscope, magnetic-correction, GPS and damping settings are carried over once, the first time the new version starts, so there should be nothing to redo.

Two layers, the coordinate grid and the Messier objects, start switched off as they always did. The layer panel turns them back on.