With just a few taps on this app, the entire universe opens before your eyes. You focus on the Earth, with its breathtaking swirls of white on blue and green masses that look like puzzle pieces. It's majestic against the mysteriousness of dark, endless space.
Your gaze expands out to the stars and planets. Out in the open sky, you start to feel small. You get lost in time as your breath steadies and your mind becomes calm and open. You start to wonder, what is our place in the universe?
The app you are using is called Cosmic Watch, a tool that allows users to explore space and time from an astronomical point of view. It acts as a world clock; an antikythera mechanism - the antique mechanical mechanism found in a shipwreck used to calculate the movements of stars and planets; an astrolabe, a model of the solar system to represent their positions and motions; and a modern day yantra, a visual tool, for mediation.
"It's like small mediation every time you look at the clock," Cosmic Watch co-founder Markus Humbel told Tech Times. "I think that is really powerful."
And what helps leave a lasting impression on users are the views that will leave you in awe, thanks to the textures created by designer Eduardo Santana, known as the "godfather" of the project. He created his own graphics based on images taken from NASA, the European Space Agency and other space agencies.
And while the Cosmic Watch has many features, first and foremast it's a real-time astronomical and world clock.
"It's the world's first astronomical clock in the digital age, interactive and three-dimensional. This is a milestone in time reading, in a way," Humbel said. "The astronomical clock is actually the most complicated discipline of watchmaking, and the mechanical astronomical clock has a major difficulty: gravity. They all need materials and metals to hold the whole thing together, it's very complicated. The good about the digital thing is you're stuck in space, it's free, it floats in the screen. That's why its so easy to understand."
The Cosmic Watch displays time in relation to the sun and cycles of the planet. What also makes this watch app unique is that it features the clock face around the Earth. Time can be displayed via a traditional clockface, digital face, by the second, seasons and year. The user can swipe around the world and select any location to see the Cosmic Watch as a world clock as well from the app's database of more than 5,000 cities.
Even though we may know what time it is in New York or Switzerland, the app attempts to help us understand more about the philosophical aspect of the question, "What is time?"
"Time is something you experience, but time also is a rhythm. Time is the actual position in the solar system," Humbel said. "Everybody has forgotten that time has something to do with the cosmic rhythm, or with the rhythm with our solar system. Even if it's so close, time is so important and either you are late, or you're on time, but you never really think about what time is and where it comes from, so that's the moment we started to realize to reconnect time in a real-time way to the actual planetary movement has great potential. People really freak out about it."
And prepare to get your mind blown even more, because the app allows users to then time travel.
"We know the planets, in which speed and which distance they are — this is a known algorithm of all the planets — so you can accelerate and decelerate and go back and see how the stars and planets were 50 years ago on the minute, on the second, actually," Humbel said.
The app also serves as a real-time star sky and shows the positions of the planets. These features can be used for navigation, or for those who want to set up their telescopes for star gazing, as well as by those who want to photograph space.
With the app's most recent update, users will be able to really feel like they're out in space with the new open-sky function.
"Now you have a bowl around the Earth with the star, which is something that does exist. You can never look at the whole outside," Humbel said. "This is a visual creation. You take the entire sky, put it around the Earth to create the celestial sphere. Now we have an open-sky function where you are really flying around the stars."
Whether you use the app to see the stars, or explore our solar system, the user might find themselves on a philosophical journey as well.
"How do I experience space and time? How can I influence it? There's a connection to it. When you look at the app, it has something magical. And that's the point," Humbel said. "This app reminds you that time itself is actually something enormously magical. The whole solar system you can say is science, but if you look at it from a different angle, the whole universe is totally crazy. We just know a little bit and we call it science, but actually, it's one big wonder."
Explore the Cosmic Watch from Celestial Dynamics for yourself by downloading the app for $3.99 for iOS and $4.25 for Android.
