Thread: Finder apps...
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Old 21-04-2016, 04:19 PM
julianh72 (Julian)
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Join Date: Jan 2014
Location: Kelvin Grove
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I find that SkEye works surprisingly well, especially if you can find a way to mount your phone on your telescope some distance off any steel (such as the tube and mount). If you have an aluminium or carbon fibre OTA, you can probably just strap the phone to the OTA; otherwise, one of those "Gorillia Pod" flexible tripods can work well. I mount mine a variety of ways, and while I occasionally get warnings about "strange magnetic fields", it never seems to upset the accuracy much (especially while you are working within one quadrant of the night sky).

SkEye's special trick is that it works in "indirect" mode so you don't need to align the phone with the telescope, you just need to fix it to the telescope. Unlike apps such as SkySafari and Google Sky Map, which give you a virtual view "through" the phone, SkEye allows you to tell it where the telescope is pointing when you start a viewing session, and then it tracks differential telescope movements from that initial calibrated alignment. You may need to do a new alignment when you move to a different part of the sky, but for me, it generally works fine on a single alignment over fairly extended periods within a quadrant or more of the night sky.
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