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 ?
- 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.
I’m not a professional by any means and am pretty new to astrophotography. Looking at the Stardroid repo there, it looks like it’s using GPS+Compass+IMU for pointing. That’s awesome for coarse positioning, but Plate Solving (what AstroHelm is doing) is using the photos themselves to do fine positioning. https://nova.astrometry.net/ is an open service that can take images and tell you where in the sky you were pointing. https://nighttime-imaging.eu/docs/master/site/advanced/plate... has some more details about different techniques and software packages. My understanding is that is basically identifies the 4-8 most prominent stars in the image and the angles between them and does a nearest neighbour search in a massive database. Pretty cool!
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!):
> The best dark-sky sites don't have Internet access.
I'm spoiled. The best dark-sky site near me, a meager 4 hour drive, is an astronomy campus with fiber internet providing wifi. Intentionally, it's not a lot of bandwidth to do streaming while you're bored, but enough to run apps like this. They also have a what they named the StarField which is an open field where there is a grid where every 10' or so has an electrical outlet popping up from the ground to power your gear. It's the darkest skies in my state that is not federal land.
Unsupported: Smartphone Eyepiece Adapter
Eyepiece adapters hold the phone’s camera over the eyepiece so you can photograph through the telescope. AstroHelm does not support this configuration. The field of view is typically too small for plate solving to work
But:
“After that, whatever I called for was in the field of view, even when I was using a 5mm eyepiece.”
They mean that the FOV seen by the phone through an eyepiece is too small to run a successful plate solve.
The comment of the user says "the plate solve was precise enough that the object I wanted was centered (for the observer, not for the phone) when I used a 5mm eyepiece" (which is usually an high-power, meaning tiny-FOV eyepiece)
Most pointing methods aren't accurate enough to correctly center an object at high power and require you to use a lower power eyepiece, nudge the object a bit, then switch to high power. I understand how you read it as slop but the two sentences aren't contradictory, and the user comment hints to an useful pointing tool :)
For more context, the other comment saying "I’m really impressed… guided me almost dead on to the double cluster when asked." is a bit funny, because the double cluster is easily seen naked-eye in suburban sky, which is as easy as it gets for deep sky objects. But the comment you quoted makes the app look good and I'm going to try it if the fall cloud cover ever goes away.
- 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.
https://github.com/sky-map-team/stardroid
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...
I'm spoiled. The best dark-sky site near me, a meager 4 hour drive, is an astronomy campus with fiber internet providing wifi. Intentionally, it's not a lot of bandwidth to do streaming while you're bored, but enough to run apps like this. They also have a what they named the StarField which is an open field where there is a grid where every 10' or so has an electrical outlet popping up from the ground to power your gear. It's the darkest skies in my state that is not federal land.
Pls fix (AI slop?):
But:“After that, whatever I called for was in the field of view, even when I was using a 5mm eyepiece.”
The comment of the user says "the plate solve was precise enough that the object I wanted was centered (for the observer, not for the phone) when I used a 5mm eyepiece" (which is usually an high-power, meaning tiny-FOV eyepiece)
Most pointing methods aren't accurate enough to correctly center an object at high power and require you to use a lower power eyepiece, nudge the object a bit, then switch to high power. I understand how you read it as slop but the two sentences aren't contradictory, and the user comment hints to an useful pointing tool :)
Edit : bad tenses and grammar fixes