At a dark-sky site there is no signal, no white light and no patience for typing. Nightfield records what you saw — object, scope, eyepiece, magnification, seeing — and keeps every entry on your phone, forever.
Amateur astronomers are told to keep a log — it is how you learn the sky and how observing clubs certify your Messier certificate. In practice the log is a damp notebook or nothing at all.
The best observing sites are rural by definition. An app that needs a connection is an app that fails exactly when you need it.
Dark adaptation takes about twenty minutes and a bright screen destroys it in seconds. Most apps have no real red mode.
Working out magnification from focal lengths at 2am with gloves on is how details stop getting recorded at all.
Every feature runs on-device. No account, no sync, no third-party SDKs — the whole catalogue ships inside the app.
Object, date and time, telescope, eyepiece, magnification, seeing, transparency, your rating and free-form notes — the fields a real logbook needs.
All 110 Messier objects, the planets and a set of bright showpieces, bundled offline with type, constellation, magnitude and best season.
Watch your Messier count climb toward 110. This is the progress observing clubs certify — and it never finishes in one night.
Record your telescope and eyepiece focal lengths once. Every entry gets the right magnification without you doing division in the dark.
The whole interface drops to deep red on black, so checking your log at the eyepiece does not cost you your dark adaptation.
Record where you observed and how dark it was, so you know why the same object looked different on two different nights.
Seven-night and six-month trends, seeing distribution, object-type breakdown and which telescope actually gets used — computed on-device.
Streaks count consecutive weeks you got out, not nights — because clouds are not your fault. Plus a monthly goal you set yourself.
First Light, Messier 10/25/50/110, Grand Tour of the planets, Ten Nights Out — milestones drawn from real observing goals.
Full-text search across objects, notes and tags. Filter by favourites or archive, sort by date, name, rating or magnification.
Bookmark objects you want to find. They stay on the Tonight screen — an in-app agenda, never a push notification.
A full restorable backup or a spreadsheet-ready log for your observing club. Written to a file you choose — no cloud involved.
Three real themes, five accent colours and three layout densities — because a screen you use at 2am should be one you chose.
Your log — including private notes and the places you observe from — is stored in an encrypted local database and never leaves the phone.
Nightfield collects nothing, because there is nowhere for it to send anything. The app declares exactly one permission — INTERNET — used solely to display this site's privacy policy inside the app.
No analytics, no crash reporting, no advertising identifiers, no third-party SDKs of any kind.
Nothing to sign up for and no email address to hand over. Open the app and start logging.
Export a complete JSON backup whenever you like, or wipe everything from Settings in two taps.
Free. No ads, no in-app purchases, no subscription.
Get it onGoogle Playcom.nightfield.nightfield · Android 7.0 and up