Technologies
Try these stargazing apps to spot constellations and more.
These astronomical maps will help you spot planets, stars and constellations in the night sky.

Stargazing with a friend or partner is a relaxing nighttime activity. But if you’re wanting to relax under dark skies and look at the stars, how will you know where to look? Or what you’re seeing? If you want to check out the celestial bodies and star clusters visible in a clear night sky, you should consider downloading a stargazing app. The best stargazing apps can give you a better map of the sky and more details about what you’re seeing.
My husband and I are far enough out in the country to see stars, but we haven’t completely escaped the city’s light pollution. Every so often before we turn in for the night, we’ll step out onto the back porch if the sky is clear, and look up. We’ve seen a shockingly bright Venus, the ISS streak by and a few shooting stars — thanks in part to help from some astronomy apps. If you want to take a look at some of the best stargazing app options, read on. These apps should help you spot planets, stars and constellations — and some of them have a free version.
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Google Sky lets you explore the reaches of space through the «eyes» of the Hubble Space Telescope, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and the Digitized Sky Survey. You can explore the wealth of information available free on mobile or desktop.
Click through the tray at the bottom of the screen to learn more about the solar system, constellations, galaxies and nebulae, views of the universe in X-ray, ultraviolet and infrared. You can also use sliding bars to see drawings of the sky by Giovanni Maria Cassini.
Plus, find where the planets are in the sky at a given time by typing the name of a planet in the search box.
The SkySafari astronomy app, which starts at $2 on iOS and free on Android, lets you hold your phone to the sky to identify planets, constellations, stars and satellites. You can also use the app to see what the sky might’ve looked like thousands of years ago, or what it will look like in the future.
Simulate past meteor showers, approaching comets and celestial events, like eclipses. SkySafari also has a constellation illustration overlay feature in case you can’t quite visualize the lion or bear that everyone else claims to see. The app also offers history, mythology and science information to accompany the images.
If you’re not sure where to get started, you can tap Tonight’s Best in the app to check out which object in the sky you could get the best look at.
The Star Tracker app works on iOS (lite) and Android to show you 88 constellations, over 8,000 and deep-sky objects, and the sun, moon and planets, all in real time. The app uses a 3D compass in AR mode that indicates the position of objects you’ve searched for. Think of it as a mobile planetarium.
To enhance constellations, Star Tracker has a graphics feature for the 12 zodiac signs and six famous deep-sky objects.
The app is free, but there’s a full version with more features for $3 and a no ads version for $1. In addition, Star Tracker Pro offers a Time Machine feature and night mode.
The International Space Station (ISS) app, available free on iOS and Android, doesn’t technically show you stars, but you can check out planets and the ISS itself. The app tracks where the in-space laboratory is currently located above the world at any given time.
Once you plug in your location — the only permission the app asks for — it can tell you how often you can expect to see the ISS in the sky. For example, residents of Louisville, Kentucky will typically be able to see the ISS between about 7:57 p.m. and 9:37 p.m. each night for about 30 seconds to a minute and a half. It’s a fleeting window — the ISS is traveling at about 17,100 miles per hour.
The app also keeps track of how long until the ISS will pass over your location again, and how long it’ll be visible. On average, it looks like the ISS is visible in a given area one to two times per day over the course of a week.
The Skyview app is $3 on iOS and $2 on Android, but both platforms have a free lite version. To use Skyview, just point your device at the sky and you can get started identifying galaxies, stars, constellations, planets — even the International Space Station. The app has night mode and an AR feature, so you can use it comfortably any time.
The app’s Sky Path’s feature lets you track objects in space to see exact locations at any date and time. In addition, Skyview has a time travel option to observe what the sky looked like in the past and might look like in the future.
No at-home space adventure is complete without the free official NASA app, which you can download for iOS or Android. Although technically you can’t use the app for stargazing in the same vein as some of the others on this list, you can still get up close and personal with space.
Check out a photo library with thousands of images constantly being updated and watch live NASA TV. In addition, the app has on-demand videos from around the agency and live streaming from the High-Definition Earth Viewing experiment on the ISS.
The app also keeps you in the know about NASA missions, launch information, upcoming sightings, news and tweets from the agency.
Star Walk 2, $3 for iOS and free for Android with in-app purchases, uses your phone’s sensors and GPS to show you a map of the night sky in real time, pinpointing the location of stars, planets, constellations, comets, the ISS and satellites.
Like SkySafari, you can tap Visible Tonight if you’re not sure where to start. The feature will tell you all upcoming astronomical events and celestial objects visible for your location. The What’s New section will also keep you posted on upcoming events. You can also view the astronomy calendar or tap the clock-face icon to select any date and time and watch the sky of different periods.
More for skywatchers
- NASA’s Incredible New Moon Map Will Serve as Blueprint for Human Missions
- Astronomers Discover Oldest Disk Galaxy Ever Hiding Deep in the Cosmos
- Scientists Spot ‘One in a Million’ Super-Earth
- Weird ‘Cotton Candy’ Planets Might Be Rocking Rings, Scientists Suggest
- Strange, Giant Exoplanet Could Be the Best Place to Look for Livable Exomoons
- Astronomers Watch Star Dance With a Black Hole, Proving Einstein Right (Again)
- 59 Weird Objects Seen on Mars, Explained
- A Giant Comet Spotted in 2017 Is Still Heading Toward Earth
- Cosmic Dead Ringers: 27 Super Strange-Looking Space Objects
- Astronomers Get First Look at a Baby Planet Being Born
Technologies
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Technologies
WWE 2K25 Jumps From the Top Rope Onto PlayStation Plus in September
Subscribers will also be able to play a turn-based strategy Persona game.

«The American Nightmare» Cody Rhodes, son of one of the greatest pro wrestlers of all time, «The American Dream» Dusty Rhodes, is the current undisputed WWE champion. And PlayStation Plus subscribers can bring Rhodes down a peg or help establish a new wrestling dynasty with the champion beginning on Sept. 16 in WWE 2K25.
PlayStation Plus is Sony’s version of Xbox Game Pass, and it offers subscribers a large and constantly expanding library of games. There are three PlayStation Plus tiers — Essential ($10 a month), Extra ($15 a month) and Premium ($18 a month) — and each gives subscribers access to games. However, only Extra and Premium tier subscribers can access the PlayStation Plus Game Catalog.
Here are all the games PS Plus Extra and Premium subscribers can access starting on Sept. 16. You can also check out the games all PS Plus subscribers can play in September, including Psychonauts 2.
Don’t miss any of our unbiased tech content and lab-based reviews. Add CNET as a preferred Google source.
WWE 2K25
Take control of your favorite superstar from the men’s and women’s divisions in this knockdown, dragout wrestling game. Become one of over 300 wrestlers from today and years past, like Rhea Ripley and Andre the Giant. This entry in the series also introduces intergender wrestling matches, barricade diving and new brawl environments where you can get over or turn heel.
Persona 5 Tactica
Join the Phantom Thieves in this real-time strategy game set in the Persona universe. You and the group wander into a bizarre realm where people are living under tyrannical oppression, and you cross paths with a revolutionary named Erina. Now you’re in cahoots with the rebels as you try to free an oppressed people and find your way back home.
Other games on PS Plus
Those are a few of the games Sony is bringing to PlayStation Plus, and subscribers can play these games as well starting on Sept. 16.
*Premium subscribers only.
For more on PlayStation Plus, here’s what to know about the service and a rundown of PS Plus Extra and Premium games added in August. You can also check out the latest and upcoming games on Xbox Game Pass and Apple Arcade.
Technologies
Little Nightmares 3 Hands-On: a Creepy Co-Op Game Arriving Just in Time for Halloween
The sequel adds cooperative play with all the haunting hallmarks of the earlier games.

After about an hour playing Little Nightmares 3, I’d used a person’s bisected halves to solve a puzzle, gotten a high score in a carnival shooting game and escaped the murderous claws of a deranged baby. As a 2-foot-tall youth trying to survive the morbid dangers of one demented area after another with my co-player, I was terrified and delighted.
I’ve only sampled the first two Little Nightmares games, but in my brief preview of Little Nightmares 3, it felt like a refined version of the series’ premise: small protagonists endangered by a large, grim world filled with traps to evade, puzzles to solve and horrid, lethal enemies to outwit. Take the scale of the animated horror movie 9, mix it with the darkest of stop-motion director Henry Selick’s maudlin settings and let players enjoy the haunting ride, room by perilous room.
This time, players aren’t alone. In Little Nightmares 3, developed by Supermassive Games, two players (or one and an AI companion) choose between characters Low (a bird-masked boy with a bow) and Alone (a girl with a jumpsuit and a wrench), who rely on each other and get out of rooms using their unique tools or just good ol’ fashioned teamwork. Sometimes this means pushing a box for the other to jump on, but other obstacles require rather complex puzzle-solving.
In the game, Low and Alone seek to escape the bleak Nowhere and its roulette of dystopian lands. My preview was limited to one of these areas — Carnevale, a demented circus where our small characters had to sneak under the feet of grotesque, ambling workers (or their corpses, tied up or swinging for the sport of their fellows). When we thought we were safe, possessed puppets sprinted after us until we could team up to knock their wooden heads off and crush them. Being noticed by anyone meant our demise, requiring frantic cooperation amid the anxious stakes of rather gruesome deaths.
It’s this tension and the dour setting that sets Little Nightmares 3 apart from other co-op games like the more excitable and dynamic Split Fiction released earlier this year, a rollercoaster flipbook of game genres that made for a breathless if not terribly coherent experience. In contrast, the section of Little Nightmares 3 I played unfolded like a series of grim vignettes that rely on its pleasingly goth trappings as much as working together with your friend (or computer teammate) to progress.
Surviving your little nightmares
While I got only an hour with the game, Little Nightmares 3 seems to iterate on rather than innovate away from its predecessors: Expect more of the same in new, grotesque settings, just with the welcome addition of tightly designed teamwork dynamics. For fans of the series, this is likely a good thing. There’s not much else like Little Nightmares.
The Carnevale stage I played through opened up with rain pelting red-and-white circus tent tops, which I as the masked Low (and someone from Bandai Namco who kindly played as the jumpsuit-wearing Alone) skittered between. Lumbering above us were brutish factory workers seeking escape at the funfair, which very quickly turned sinister as we very shortly saw some hanging tied-up as others took turns beating them like a piñata. We entered one room to find one worker in connected boxes as the subject of a magician’s saw-in-half trick…which was no trick, as we had to separate the halves to climb out of a window. I tried, and failed, to ignore the viscera slopping out of the boxes.
While we hid from the human-size enemies, we had to fight the wooden puppets. Like Geppeto’s most horrid creations, they ambushed us in several rooms, requiring me to knock their heads off with Low’s bow and run away from their decapitated bodies while my teammate rushed forward to crush their heads with Alone’s wrench.
But most of the rooms are about solving puzzles, which could be as simple as moving a box for my teammate to jump up and pull a switch or figure out how a radio plays into a complex solution. While these quiet moments are a nice break from the tense combat or pursuit, they also give time to appreciate the macabre backgrounds: I ran past one room with a circle of empty tall chairs only to come back a few seconds later to find them filled with puppets, unmoving but watching.
And then there are the really, really tense moments. We moved from the carnival to the adjoining candy factory (apparently where all those brutes work) and up to the offices where the boss works, to find him asleep with the TV droning on in the darkness…and his frankly hideous baby nestled next to him. Naturally, we had to make noise, cranking open a grate, awakening the terrifying spawn who ran after us. After many, many failed escapes, my teammate and I discovered we had to scramble for a hiding place after making it past the grate.
This was perhaps the most frustrating part of the preview as we panicked looking for a solution to our deadly woes (as opposed to the slow, methodical gameplay earlier) — but that’s part of the tension, especially when adding a teammate to the mix. Ultimately, it was a hard-won lesson in patience. In the next room, a kitchen, the nightmarish baby banged a bowl on the table until the father walked over to a corpse (presumably his worker) and cut out some meat for his ghoulish child to eat.
In my short time with it, Little Nightmares 3 seems like a cooperative spooky storybook for players and their friends (but not couch buddies, sadly — it’s online co-op only) to experience. How much it lives up to previous games in the series, especially as developer Supermassive Games takes more of the reins from the franchise’s original creators Tarsier Games, is anyone’s guess. (Tarsier’s similar spiritual sequel to Little Nightmares, Reanimal, is coming in 2026.)
But as the air turns crisp and Halloween beckons, it’s the best time of the year for a creepy co-op game like Little Nightmares 3 to land.
Little Nightmares 3 comes out Oct.10, 2025, for PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch and Nintendo Switch 2.
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