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  • Really dumb question - but how does the phone know the distance from your phone lens to your telescope lens? I assume this varies greatly from mount to mount and will change how accurate the app is?
    by jnsie
  • I often use Stardroid/SkyMap for this, which is free (open source) software

    https://github.com/sky-map-team/stardroid

    by preisschild
  • Looks cool! Plate solving is an incredibly useful technology for astronomy, putting it into the smartphone makes it available for a lot of "non-smart" setups. Only one question: does it have a polar align feature? This is my biggest challenge, when e.g. setting up a simple star tracker. The app would be very useful for this.
    by _ph_
  • Interesting, thanks.

    A related issue I’ve been wondering about: Why don’t gimbals for cameras and smartphones offer an astrophotography mode for long exposures of the night sky?

    by Tepix
  • >"Works Offline

    The best dark-sky sites don't have Internet access. AstroHelm’s plate solving engine runs entirely on device. No internet connection required, and your camera images stay on your phone."

    This looks like a great tool for the following application:

    o Off-grid, deep wilderness, high mountain, broad desert or ocean navigation (like the way ancient seafarers would navigate via the position of the stars in the nighttime sky, relative to them)

    (Also, if you're a Star Trek fan and/or futurist, you'd expect that computers on future spacecraft would or could run some version of this software, or at least some form of Plate Solving / Astrometric Solving algorithm...)

    Anyway, the app looks great!

    Related:

    General wikipedia information page about Astrometric Solving (does not include algorithms!):

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astrometric_solving

    Paper: New Algorithms for Automated Astrometry, by Chris Harvey (2004) (An excellent paper about all that is necessary for such an algorithm!):

    https://cs.nyu.edu/home/people/in_memoriam/roweis/papers/Har...

    by peter_d_sherman
  • This looks like a nice alternative to PiFinder. No extra hardware required. https://www.pifinder.io/
    by skypanther
  • - Accurate up to within 10 arcseconds (1/360 of a degree)

    - Computes coordinates in less than a second

    For comparison, the sky moves 15 arcseconds per second. So without a motorized mount to keep the telescope on target, the accuracy will be short-lived.

    by danbruc
  • Hey, I'd actually use that. I build telescopes (see personal site in profile) and only do visual astronomy. I voluntarily prefer to use old-ish phones, i.e. currently I am using an iPhone SE 2022. Do you think the weak signal under the night sky would work with your plate solving ?
    by chantepierre

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