Re: [In development] constellation-follow your star
 

Friend asked me just yesterday when i showed off the N900 "Can it tell you what stars you are looking at? That's the only reason i'd buy a phone like that."

:cool:

Re: [Under consideration] constellation-follow your star
 

Easy.

Have an initialization process: the soft shows you first a bright star or object (the moon...), you point it to the object and press a button to initialize. Just as it is done on computer-controlled scopes (except than only one star is needed).

And be blessed that there is no compass, that is the biggest source of errors in the skyscout.

Re: [Under consideration] constellation-follow your star
 

I've startet a Brainstorm to discuss the electronic compass stuff and all related topics. Would like to hear more details :-)
The initialization process would be an easy thing, but afaik there will be problems with using the accelerometer, because at slow movements you have nearly no acceleration....
http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=42870

Re: [In development] constellation-follow your star
 

How do your options compare with Orrey? It's location sensitive, and worked nicely for me last night verifying that I was indeed seeing Mars near the Moon...

Re: [In development] constellation-follow your star
 

Alan, thanks to your last post I just discovered http://wiki.maemo.org/Orrery and I'm impressed!

Playing with this little toy right now. I should go to sleep.......

Re: [In development] constellation-follow your star
 

Added Orrery link to starting-post. I will suggest to host a ciclope astro server to our unix-workgroup at university some time soon so we have a tile server for further usage, interested? Maybe I should talk to some of the cyclope team aswell, we'll see.

Re: [In development] constellation-follow your star
 

Orrery is also very nice, didn't know that program until you mentioned it.

To compare the two programs have a look at this video from zehjotkah: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1mpCAWCKC4
It's german, but you'll see what stellarium does and how it looks.

Re: [In development] constellation-follow your star
 

Thanks for adding a link to my orrery program. It is nowhere near as beautiful as stellarium, but I'm having fun working on it. I'd very much appreciate it if people would give it a try and send me suggestions for improvements, either through its Bugzilla database, or just by mailing me at orrery.moko@gmail.com.

One minor thing orrery has going for it is that it was originally written for Openmoko Freerunner phones, which have about 1/20 (really!) of the processing power of an N900. So I had to work hard to make the calculations run efficiently, or else it would have been unusable on a Freerunner. On an N900, it is quite responsive.

It still needs a lot of "hildonizing" to fit in well with other Maemo 5 apps.

Documentation for the program can be found here:
http://wiki.maemo.org/Orrery

Thanks again!

Re: [In development] constellation-follow your star
 

Stellarium is in extras-devel now.

http://maemo.org/packages/view/stellarium/
http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=40834

All in all this can be moved to Implemented.

Re: [In development] constellation-follow your star
 

Ken, just wanted to say a massive thank you for this program. I and my better half bought a 114mm reflector a week ago. Thanks to having Orrery on my N900 we were able to find both Mars and Saturn last night.

We got a fantastic view of both before the fog rolled in (Ireland; clear nights are a novelty here.).

I'll not claim to have exhaustively used the application but I was wondering if there's a way to configure the date display so it follows the more logical UK dd/mm/yy format?

Is there a way I can donate to the project?