Lodestar for Android

Aim your camera at the stars

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Project maintained by feetball Hosted on GitHub Pages — Theme by mattgraham

Privacy policy — Lodestar for Android

Effective October 18, 2026

Lodestar is designed to work entirely on your phone. It does not collect any data about you. There are no accounts, no analytics, no advertising and no tracking, and the developer never receives your location or anything else from the app.

What the app uses, and why

• Location. Your position (precise or approximate, as you allow) is used on your phone to work out where stars and planets appear in your sky and to turn the compass heading into true north. It is not stored on any server. You can instead choose observing sites on a map.
• Camera. If you turn on the camera view, the live picture is shown behind the sky overlay. The picture is processed on your phone only and is never recorded, stored or sent anywhere.
• Motion sensors. The gyroscope, accelerometer and compass are read on your phone to tell where your camera points.
• Saved sites and settings are stored only on your phone. If Android backup is turned on for your Google account, your settings and saved sites are included in that backup, like those of any app; nothing else from Lodestar is backed up.

Network use

Lodestar’s catalogs and calculations are all on the device. By default the only network requests are:

• Map tiles from OpenFreeMap when you open the site map. The tile server sees your IP address and the map area being shown.
• Your phone’s geocoding service (on most phones provided by Google) receives the coordinates of an observing site you add or edit, to find the country and time zone of that site.

These services handle the requests under their own privacy policies (OpenFreeMap, Google).

GoTo mount control talks to your telescope mount over your local Wi-Fi network only; nothing about it leaves that network.

Optional online data (off by default)

Settings › Online Data has four switches. All of them are off until you turn them on, and Lodestar works fully without them. Each switch makes ordinary HTTPS requests to one provider to download data to your phone:

Switch	What is downloaded	Provider	What the provider receives
Satellite passes	Orbit data of the ISS and other bright satellites (about 75 KB, at most every 12 to 24 hours)	CelesTrak	Your IP address
Starlink streak warnings	Orbit data of the Starlink satellites (about 4.7 MB, once a day, only on an unmetered network such as Wi-Fi)	CelesTrak	Your IP address
Comets	The comet orbit file (about 164 KB, at most once a day)	Minor Planet Center	Your IP address
Cloud forecast	The hourly cloud-cover forecast (about 64 KB, no more often than the provider allows)	MET Norway	Your IP address and your location rounded to 0.1° (about 10 km)

Every request also carries the app’s name and version (for example Lodestar/1.0) and the address of the support page, as the providers require. Nothing else about you or your phone is sent: no account, advertising identifier, device identifier or exact location. Lodestar does not keep a server of its own and never sees these requests.

• The downloads happen when you open the app, when you switch a feed on and when you press Update now; nothing runs in the background.
• The downloaded data is stored only on your phone, outside Android’s backup. The switches themselves are not backed up either.
• Turning a switch off deletes the data it downloaded.
• A failed or unreadable download never replaces the data you already have.

The providers keep their own server logs under their own policies: see the websites of CelesTrak and the Minor Planet Center, and MET Norway’s privacy statement. Orbital data: CelesTrak, T. S. Kelso. Orbital elements: IAU Minor Planet Center. Weather forecast from MET Norway (data licensed under CC BY 4.0).

Children

Lodestar does not collect personal information from anyone, including children.

Changes and contact

If this policy changes, the new version will be posted on this page with a new effective date. Questions are welcome on the project’s issue tracker: https://github.com/feetball/Lodestar-Android/issues.