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."
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.
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.
Google "Celestron SkyScout" if you don't understand the last sentence.
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
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...
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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?
