[Cthulhu_]

I've tried one of those apps (Night Sky?), but I always find it's well out of alignment, stars being much further to the left or right than the app seems to indicate, things being closer together than they seem from my own perspective, etc.

Don't think it's the phone, it's a fairly new one etc (has all the AR bells and whistles on it).

[digitalsushi]

That's fair. But what a delightful failure scenario: you end up looking for the thing you set out to find.

[yial]

Perspective is very important. Sometimes - especially when looking for a specific item when doing something like stargazing, it’s amazing what else you find along the way.

[ortusdux]

None of the apps I've seen use AR. As far as I know, they are 100% gyro & compass based. These tend to need to be calibrated. G-maps has a built in calibration tool, I believe there is a calibration option in the android dev tools, and there are several apps that claim to calibrate as well.

I've been meaning to dive into ARCore, and on my list was a constellation based compass & gyro calibration app.