Sky through your camera
Hold your phone up to the night sky and see the stars, planets and Moon labelled over the camera picture, with the old Arabic names many of them still carry. No phone handy? Drag the drawn sky instead.
Why the North Star tells you where you are
Polaris sits less than one degree from the point the whole sky turns around. All night, while other stars rise and set, it stays in the same spot above the north.
Polaris stands as many degrees above the horizon as you are north of the equator. At the North Pole it is straight overhead. On the equator it sits on the horizon. In the UAE it is between about 23° and 26° up.
Hold your fist out at arm's length: it covers about 10° of sky. From the UAE, Polaris is about two and a half fists above the northern horizon.
Ahmad ibn Majid, the 15th-century navigator from Julfar in today's Ras Al Khaimah, wrote about measuring the height of al-Jady to work out a ship's latitude. Arab sailors measured it in finger widths, called isba'.
Using the camera view
Positions are worked out on your phone from the time and your city: about 95 of the brightest stars, the Sun, Moon, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. Many star names used around the world are Arabic: Aldebaran (الدبران, "the follower"), Betelgeuse (يد الجوزاء), Altair (الطائر) and Vega (الواقع).
Match the field of view to your camera, and wave the phone in a figure of eight to settle the compass. Phone compasses are thrown off by cars, metal railings and magnetic cases.
The UAE's big communication satellites, like Thuraya and Al Yah, sit in geostationary orbit about 36,000 km up. They stay fixed over the equator, to the south of us, and are far too faint to see by eye. Earth-watching satellites like KhalifaSat fly much lower and cross the sky in a few minutes.
The camera picture is only drawn on your screen. Nothing is recorded, saved or sent, and the page has no way to upload it. Never point the camera, or your eyes, at the Sun.
Sources: star positions are standard J2000 catalogue values; Sun, Moon and planet positions use Paul Schlyter's method "How to compute planetary positions", good to a fraction of a degree. Arabic star names: Paul Kunitzsch and Tim Smart, "A Dictionary of Modern Star Names", and the IAU Working Group on Star Names. Polaris's height matching your latitude, and the fist-at-arm's-length rule, are standard astronomy taught by NASA. Ahmad ibn Majid: his navigation book Kitab al-Fawa'id. Geostationary orbit height: NASA. The drawn sky is a simplified illustration. Original experiment by Mariam Alzaabi.