CALIBRATED SKY INSTRUMENT
Parallax turns your phone into a calibrated sky instrument. It clears the planes, satellites, and lens artifacts behind roughly 99% of sightings — and the moment a second phone sees the same thing, it fixes a real position in the sky.
// WHAT IT IS
Most "sightings" are aircraft, satellites, or the camera arguing with a bright light. Parallax retires those first, logs what survives as a clean candidate, and waits for a second viewpoint to turn a picture into a position.
Cross-checks every capture against known air traffic and orbital passes, so the ordinary explanation is ruled out before you ever call something anomalous.
Flags lens flare, internal reflection, sensor bloom, and hot pixels — the usual suspects that turn a streetlight into a UFO.
What survives the filters is recorded with time, bearing, elevation, and your calibration state — a record you can actually defend.
The headline move: when a second Parallax user captures the same object, the parallax between viewpoints resolves an actual distance and altitude.
Magnetometer and inclinometer, corrected against a horizon-and-star fix, so "north-northeast at 40° up" actually means something.
Every clean candidate feeds an on-device census of what you've actually seen, sorted from trivially explained to genuinely unresolved.
// HOW IT WORKS
A quick horizon-and-star sight aligns the phone's compass and tilt to the real sky.
Point and shoot. Parallax records the frame plus precise bearing, elevation, time, and location.
Air-traffic, orbital, and optical filters run on-device and retire the easy explanations.
If a second phone logs the same object, the two lines of sight cross — and you get a position, not just a picture.
// THE IDEA BEHIND IT
Triangulation isn't mysticism — it's the geometry surveyors and astronomers have used for centuries. Two known positions plus the angle each measures to the same object fix that object in three dimensions. Parallax just puts the instrument in your pocket and does the arithmetic honestly.
An honest note. A single phone gives you a filtered, calibrated candidate and a bearing — not a distance. Distance and altitude only fall out when a second independent observer sees the same object. Parallax is an instrument for measuring the sky carefully; it makes no claim about what any given light is.
// PRIVATE BY DESIGN
The filtering, the calibration, the census — all of it runs on your device. A candidate is yours until you explicitly submit it to be triangulated against someone else's.
Parallax is coming to the App Store. Be one of the two phones.