Perfect live wallpaper for Android!
Interactive background-Tap anywhere on the screen and new stars will appear!
Full support for landscape mode and home-screen switching!

Enjoy this lovely, free and useful live wallpaper!

Installation instructions:
Home -> Menu -> Wallpapers -> Live Wallpapers

Due to their great distance from the Earth, all stars except the Sun appear to the human eye as shining points in the night sky that twinkle because of the effect of the Earth's atmosphere. The Sun is also a star, but it is close enough to the Earth to appear as a disk instead, and to provide daylight. Other than the Sun, the star with the largest apparent size is R Doradus, with an angular diameter of only 0.057 arcseconds.

The disks of most stars are much too small in angular size to be observed with current ground-based optical telescopes, and so interferometer telescopes are required to produce images of these objects. Another technique for measuring the angular size of stars is through occultation. By precisely measuring the drop in brightness of a star as it is occulted by the Moon (or the rise in brightness when it reappears), the star's angular diameter can be computed.

Stars range in size from neutron stars, which vary anywhere from 20 to 40 km (25 mi) in diameter, to supergiants like Betelgeuse in the Orion constellation, which has a diameter approximately 650 times larger than the Sun—about 900,000,000 km (560,000,000 mi). However, Betelgeuse has a much lower density than the Sun.

In astronomy, luminosity is the amount of light, and other forms of radiant energy, a star radiates per unit of time. The luminosity of a star is determined by the radius and the surface temperature. However, many stars do not radiate a uniform flux—the amount of energy radiated per unit area—across their entire surface. The rapidly rotating star Vega, for example, has a higher energy flux at its poles than along its equator.

Surface patches with a lower temperature and luminosity than average are known as starspots. Small, dwarf stars such as the Sun generally have essentially featureless disks with only small starspots. Larger, giant stars have much bigger, much more obvious starspots, and they also exhibit strong stellar limb darkening. That is, the brightness decreases towards the edge of the stellar disk. Red dwarf flare stars such as UV Ceti may also possess prominent starspot features.

Stars always twinkle because they’re so far away from Earth that, even through large telescopes, they appear only as pinpoints. And it’s easy for Earth’s atmosphere to disturb the pinpoint light of a star.

As a star’s light pierces our atmosphere, each single stream of starlight is forced by the atmosphere to zig and zag this way and that. . . . and so stars appear to twinkle.

It’s pretty tough to figure out which objects are stars and which are planets just by looking for the twinklers vs the non-twinklers. But if you can recognize a planet in some other way, you might notice the steadiness of its light by contrasting it to a nearby star.

By the way, if you could see them both stars and planets from outer space, both would shine steadily. There’d be no atmosphere to disturb the steady streaming of their light.

What’s more – while it’s true that, for the most part, planets don’t twinkle – you might see them twinkling a little if you spot them low in the sky. That’s because, in the direction of any horizon, you’re looking through more atmosphere than when you look overhead. Even planets can’t withstand too much atmosphere, because it’s the atmosphere that makes them twinkle!