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Comments (16)

• Tepix
  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?
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  danbruc
  - Accurate up to within 10 arcseconds (1/360 of a degree)- Computes coordinates in less than a secondFor 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.
• chantepierre
  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 ?
• skypanther
  This looks like a nice alternative to PiFinder. No extra hardware required. https://www.pifinder.io/
• soltanov
  Good call ditching ML. Traditional CV still wins on power, latency, and determinism for star centroiding.
• fanatic2pope
  This looks great, but why is there no "plus" version for Android?
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  peter_d_sherman
  >"Works OfflineThe 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_solvingPaper: 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...
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  preisschild
  I often use Stardroid/SkyMap for this, which is free (open source) softwarehttps://github.com/sky-map-team/stardroid
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  rrr_oh_man
  Cool project!Pls fix (AI slop?): 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.”
• promptspheree
  [flagged]
• nateparkerdev
  [flagged]