Lodestar
Aim your camera at the night sky.
Project maintained by feetball
Hosted on GitHub Pages — Theme by mattgraham
Privacy policy
Effective October 17, 2026
Lodestar is designed to work entirely on your iPhone. 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 iPhone to work out
where stars and planets appear in your sky and to find 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. Video
is processed on your iPhone only and is never recorded, stored or sent anywhere.
- Motion sensors. The gyroscope, accelerometer and compass are read on your iPhone to tell where
your camera points.
- Saved sites and settings are stored only on your iPhone (and in your device backups, as for any
app).
Network use
Lodestar’s catalogs and calculations are all on the device. The only network requests go to Apple:
- Apple Maps loads map tiles when you open the site map.
- Apple’s geocoding service receives the coordinates of an observing site you add or edit, to look
up its time zone.
Apple handles these requests under its own privacy policy (https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/).
If you choose to share analytics with app developers in iOS Settings, Apple may provide anonymous crash
reports to the developer.
Children
Lodestar does not collect personal information from anyone, including children.
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/issues.