With your permission, Redshift uses your current location to show you precisely which stars, constellations, and planets you should be able to see. If you enable the Follow Sky option, RedShift will update what you should expect to see as you point your iPad or iPhone at different spots in the sky while you pan around. If you can generally just pick out one of the Dippers, Red Shift will open your eyes to many more constellations.
An observatory option lets you jump from your own location's view of the sky to any celestial object you'd like to see--the moon, a planet, or a specific star. You can zoom in to impressive levels of depth, too.
One especially fun feature is 3D Flight mode. Instead of just jumping directly to, say, Jupiter, you can have RedShift animate the zippy journey past stars and planets. (Fortunately, this space travel does not occur in real time.) There's even a Grand Tour option, in which RedShift takes you from the Moon to Mars, Saturday, and beyond. It's truly excellent.
Once you've navigated to a a specific space object, you can tap into Rotation Mode. That lets you spin the planet around in all directions, which can also adjust your view of the rest of the galaxy from different vantage points around the planet, moon, or star. Whenever you're locked onto a specific object, you can also tap on an i button to see basic information about it--where it is, how many moons it has if applicable, its size, and so on. There's also a Wikipedia button that you can tap, which loads the appropriate article without exiting RedShift.
The app is packed with options. Night Vision mode casts the whole app in a red-toned hue, making it easier to use outside in the dark without blasting out your retinas. You can control whether constellation images should be displayed, or just the traced outline of the stars, or nothing at all. You can adjust how bright or dim each should be. You can control whether labels for each heavenly body should appear in English, Latin, or Brief Latin. You can control how many heavenly objects and labels appear on the screen at any given time, toggle sound effects, and even trigger an option to see the (decidedly less interesting) daytime sky.