ever tried using one of those AI stargazing apps to ID stuff?? mine is very sure about a lot of things...

so last night i point my phone at a bright dot over the neighbor's roof and the app goes "Jupiter!!" with total confidence it was a plane. it was blinking jupiter doesnt blink lol

to be fair it got Vega right and i was weirdly proud of it?? like good job little app!! (fun fact, Vega was the north star around 12,000 BC and it will be again in about 13,000 years, which i think about way too often...)

anyway i cant tell if these apps are actually getting smarter or if they just use your GPS and the time and guess. which is probably fine for planets?? but satellites seem to totally break it

also i keep forgetting to turn off the red night mode, so then i open my phone at work and everything's red and my coworkers think something's wrong with me... between this and the DJ controller i really need to stop collecting hobbies

what apps do you guys use?? and has one ever gotten something hilariously wrong for you?? i need to know im not alone out here yelling at my phone in the backyard!!

pretty sure its mostly the GPS, the time and your phone's compass doing basic star chart math. thats been around for years, now it just says AI on the box... honestly mine once very confidently told me a plane was Jupiter, so i dont think its getting any smarter. that's partly why i still wear an analog watch. you can point the hour hand at the sun and find south, and it's never once told me a plane was a planet...

the watch trick doesnt work that way tho like, point the hour hand at the sun and south is halfway between the hour hand and 12, not the hour hand itself thats northern hemisphere only, and during daylight saving you use 1 instead of 12. so the watch has probably been lying to you too, just more quietly lol

also most of those apps arent really "AI" identifying anything they take your GPS, compass and gyro, then show whatever's in the star catalog in that direction a plane cant be in the catalog, so it just names the closest bright thing. usually the real probl

fair, i do use the 1 from march to november. thats not the watch lying though, thats the government moving noon an hour once a year and expecting everyone to just go along with it... the watch is fine. and yeah i guess Jupiter probably was back there somewhere behind the plane, so technically the app wasnt wrong, it just wasnt paying attention

oh sure PurpleFencepost, the watch is perfect and the government is the one who's wrong... very brave stand!! and "technically" Jupiter was behind the plane, so the app gets partial credit for pointing at a 737. i once mixed up Venus and a streetlight so i cant really talk lol

venus and a streetlight is pretty forgivable here. the city swapped all the streetlights on my block for those blinding white LED ones last spring, and theres apparently an ordinance saying they have to stay that bright "for safety"... so now the brightest thing in my sky is the pole across the street the app probably thinks its a planet too