Show HN: AstroHelm – Use your phone camera to aim a telescope or telephoto lens

It should. I have users reporting good experience with iPhone XS. It is heavily dependent on your local light pollution levels though.

Since the plate solving happens periodically, the sky drift will quickly be corrected!

It's meaningless anyway, unless you have a calibration approach the home page doesn't mention. Aligning a phone to within 10 arcseconds of where your scope is pointing is... ambitious :)

It would be easier if you could use an eyepiece adapter. I have no idea why the page claims "The field of view is typically too small for plate solving to work." for that approach - it works just fine with a FOV of at least 0.2 degrees or so, which is much smaller than what most beginner/intermediate scopes have.

And if you do have a scope with a smaller TFOV, I'd argue you're likely not the target audience for the app. (Yes, you can get there cheaply and as a first scope, but it's not the usual route)

Edit: I want to be clear it's not a diss on the app - it's great. Plate solving at that speed is pretty cool. I just wish it'd work at smaller TFOVs :)

OP mixed up accuracy and resolution.

We have a prototype polar alignment feature in the works! The benefit of plate solving is you can actually do a two-point polar alignment: just take two pictures with different RA, and we will know where the axis is. Taking more pictures would improve accuracy.

They do! The "night mode" in camera apps all utilize gimbals

The distance doesn't matter, since the stars are almost infinitely far away, so there's no parallax. You do need to correct for the angle though. We support daytime alignment using, say, a distant treetop, or at night align on the object you are observing.

We launched Android recently and was using this opportunity to experiment with pricing and packaging a little bit!

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.

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.

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 :)

Edit : bad tenses and grammar fixes