The Wii and Nintendo DS offer a level of intuitive interaction with games never before achieved on a mainstream gaming platform. For this reason, Nintendo and third parties are able to produce “non-games” that practically anyone can pick up for fun or practical use, even if they’re not games in the traditional sense. Nintendo’s “Touch Generations” series has offerings that make it easy for anyone to enjoy the DS, with releases such as Brain Age, Electroplankton, and Nintendogs.

Each week, we’ll present you with some of our ideas that we think would be potentially useful and fun non-games and applications for the Wii or Nintendo DS. Maybe someone out there will decide to make a homebrew application based on it. Maybe some official developer will decide it’s an idea worth trying out. Or maybe it will simply spark your imagination and open your eyes to the endless possibilities of Nintendo’s new systems. This week, we look at the potential astronomy programs such as Starry Night could have on the Nintendo DS.

I’ve always loved astronomy - I’m sort of the go-to guy among my friends when it comes to anything involving the night sky. Especially when you’re out in the middle of nowhere and you have a clear sky above you, the sight of billions of stars littering the backdrop of space is an awe-inspiring view. I’m always able to name the major constellations for my friends who suddenly find an interest in the sky above them, and I’m able to tell a little bit about the stars that make up those constellations as well as share the mythological stories behind each constellation.

However, astronomy is merely a hobby of mine, and nothing I’ve spent years and years of school classes committing to hard memory. For this reason, I try and have a star chart around on certain trips. For the longest time, I kept a cheapy, $5 star chart about 8 or 10 inches across in the glove compartment of my car, until I upgraded to the extremely detailed, 15-inch, $40 Firefly Planisphere Deluxe for the band camp trip my senior year of high school. Of course, bringing around a 15-inch planisphere isn’t exactly convenient, and it really doesn’t tell me much other than star positions and names. Plus, I’d have to bring around a red flashlight to be able to read the chart out in a dark field and adjust it to the correct date and time.

Even then, the Firefly Planisphere doesn’t hold a candle to the Starry Night computer software, which can show the complete sky at any time of the day or night, displaying stars, planets, meteor showers, satellites, etc. all rotating on the screen in real-time, just as everything scattered across the night sky would shift as time went by. The Starry Night software even allows you to click on an object to read more about it. But I’m not about to lug my laptop around with me everywhere either.

Enter the DS. If the DS Lite can be conveniently small enough to take with me into a dark field and powerful enough to run things like complex video games, I’m sure a copy of Starry Night on the handheld could come in extremely handy for these sorts of things. Instead of having to carry around a 15″ frisbee with me, I can simply pull a DS Lite out of my pocket and let it tell me what I’m looking at in the sky.

There are a few problems with putting such a detailed program onto a platform such as the DS, but impressively enough, the DS and its many features could theoretically compensate for such problems. To begin with, the DS outputs at a screen resolution far lower than your typical computer monitor. At best, the DS would be able to show you a full view of one quadrant of your hemisphere’s sky (as the PC version would), but would have to limit the stars on screen to those bright enough to show with the limited pixels on the DS screen. Solution? Well, the PC version can zoom like you wouldn’t imagine. When zoomed out, the program already shows a far more detailed map of the night sky than any planisphere star chart will show you. If you zoom in further, though, it’s almost as if you’re putting a deep-space telescope into action, allowing you to see stars and galaxies you never knew where there. With the DS, you could simply use the stylus to click and drag a rectangle over the area you’d like to zoom in on, and the screen would zoom in and resize for you. With this solution, you’d be able to see the major stars in each constellation while zoomed out, and still have the option of a more detailed sky (if you were using a telescope, perhaps) if you wanted.

Clicking on a star with the stylus could simply center the star and label it with its name, and maybe it’s classification and magnitude. Clicking it again would zoom into the star and give you a more detailed look at what a star of its kind would look like, as well as about a paragraph of information on the star, as the actual Starry Night program does. Of course, you don’t have to look at merely stars alone. Clicking your way through icons along the side or bottom of the screen would open up menu options allowing you to select your viewing options. You could populate your screen with all the stars, planets, galaxies, asteroids, satellites, and comets that you’d like. You could even choose to add artificial references onto the screen such as traditional constellation lines, modern constellation boundaries, the celestial equator, the meridian, and even the ecliptic.

Now what would really be cool is if there were a pre-recorded guided tour on this thing, which isn’t a prominent feature on the Starry Night program for PC (since most people don’t drag their PCs with them out into the field). It’s tucked away for those that don’t have anything else to do at their computers. Of course, any recorded guided tour would have to be specific to the time of year as well as the hemisphere the view is in, but that can easily be customized. Imagine those headphones you rent/buy at a museum that you could put on, and have everything in the museum explained to you by an expert. Or imagine the giant star lab thing you might possibly have had in elementary school, where your class would enter a giant inflatable planetarium as a teacher explained the stars. A guided tour could play out of the DS speakers or on a personal set of headphones, pointing out constellations and sights of interest, showing the general location of a constellation on the full sky map on the top screen, and a closer, detailed map on the bottom screen to help you locate the stars in real life. Perhaps here, the Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection could be used to send special updates for when an unscheduled satellite passes overhead, or a nova or supernova can be seen occurring. Who knows, maybe a brand new comet will be discovered just as Hale-Bopp was in the 90s, and the online capabilities of the DS would provide you with the updates to view and learn about the comet’s origins.

Of course, what makes non-games appealing on the DS aside from their easy pick-up and play design is the fun factor. Brain Age uses the incentive of challenging you to improve your daily progress. Nintendogs allows you to buy more toys, more puppies, interior decoration, in addition to allowing the simple enjoyment of playing with virtual puppies. What could Starry Night DS have? Perhaps there’s a mode challenging you to learn the constellation, either by matching the constellation to its name, or perhaps asking you to connect-the-dots of the constellation itself. You know, though, not everyone agrees on the constellations up in the sky. Maybe you could draw out your own constellations in the sky by connecting the stars with lines, and drawing a picture around them to create your own constellations and asterisms. Then, you could send your constellations either to a nearby friend who may be stargazing with you, or upload them to a server to share your creativity with others.

Astronomy has been all but lost among Americans and even the rest of the world as an object of public interest. Once the rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union in the Space Race ended, people just haven’t cared as much. It’s understandable; why worry about what’s out there when we have so much to worry about down here? Still, though, there’s a lot more going on out there than we realize and it’s a shame that most people have no idea of everything out there that dwarfs us, our lives, and our home. By offering a pocket-sized night sky companion to us in the form of a DS game, some astronomy product company could help rekindle the interest of the public in what exactly makes up the beautiful night sky.

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