WANDERERS finds you on the real Earth, then guides you to objects studied with NASA's SPHEREx and WISE telescopes and ESA's Gaia. An extra to the WANDERERS console, where you can enter any coordinates.
Everything is computed on your phone. Motion data never leaves it; your location only leaves it rounded to about 50 km, to fetch NASA's satellite picture of your region. Open the WANDERERS console →
Screen up, hands off, away from laptops and magnets. Hold still until the first dot fills, then give it a quarter turn on the table and hold again: four times.
Why four? The gyroscope knows exactly how far you turned. If the compass disagrees, something nearby is bending it, and averaging four directions cancels the phone's own magnetic bias.
View held. Drag to move. Pinch out to follow the phone again.
1. Tap something you can see. 2. Aim the big gold crosshair at it. 3. Tap Calibrate. North is then set from what you see, and from then on the gyroscope alone keeps it: no more compass drift. The teal markers show where WANDERERS currently thinks landmarks are.
Know which way a street or wall points? Tap the direction, then point the camera that way and tap Calibrate:
Drag the sky. With the Eye or Deep sky on, drag it until one thing you can see sits where you see it. It fixes direction and tilt, like a sight check, and needs no camera.
Blue: the path it has taken. Green, dashed: the path ahead. The dot is where it is now.
Star data: HYG database v4.0 (Hipparcos, Yale Bright Star, Gliese), CC BY-SA 4.0.
Frame outlines: MAST (STScI), every public Webb imaging frame (). Webb pixels: ESA ESASky JWST maps. Background: DSS / 2MASS. What Webb is doing right now: Space Telescope Live ↗
Motion: the gyroscope drives every movement; the compass only sets north, averaged while the phone lies flat and corrected slowly after (sensor fusion, tested on simulated noisy sensors: 0.1–0.5° error, 0.1° wobble). Sky: J2000 positions precessed to today (IAU 1976), UTC time and Earth's rotation (IAU 1982 sidereal time) at your GPS position, refraction (Saemundsson). Magnetic north to true north: NOAA/BGS World Magnetic Model 2025. Earth imagery: NASA Blue Marble and Black Marble via NASA GIBS. Cities: GeoNames.
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Going somewhere with poor signal? Save the Deep photographs here first. Only the latitude of the place matters, so one save works on any night. It saves the background chosen under Deep (Visible or Infrared). The Eye view already works without a connection.