Can you use your phone as a finder on your telescope?
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- Опубликовано: 28 июл 2024
- You can use your phone along with Sky Safari to help out your observing sessions, though you can't use it as a finder by itself. Here are links to the mount adapters I used:
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Celestron Piggyback Mount: amzn.to/2DUnumI
Phone holder: amzn.to/2DSQpHL (not exactly the same as what I used, but similar)
www.earthtospacescience.com
General Astronomy and Weather Product Links:
Celestron 8x42 Binoculars: amzn.to/3LaNY2d
Orion Starblast Telescope: amzn.to/3vFZ3BL
Orion 6" Dobsonian Telescope: amzn.to/3KhDA7o
Orion 8" Dobsonian Telescope: amzn.to/37JPb22
Zhumell 100mm Dobsonian Telescope: amzn.to/39ioDW7
Zhumell 130mm Dobsonian Telescope: amzn.to/3OBeiEP
Skywatcher 80ED Refractor: amzn.to/3Ms06w3
Skywatcher 100ED Refractor: amzn.to/3LjnhbD
Skywatcher 120ED Refractor: amzn.to/3rNwukY
Skywatcher 6" Dobsonian Telescope: amzn.to/3k9uyyP
Skywatcher 8" Dobsonian Telescope: amzn.to/3LiYtRc
Celestron 6SE: amzn.to/3kciCfN
Celestron 8SE: amzn.to/3LtkXPe
Celestron Evolution 8" EdgeHD: bit.ly/3OEppgg
Celestron Evolution 9.25": bit.ly/3EN3Llz
Celestron Skyportal Wifi Module (for controlling SE telescopes with phone or tablet): amzn.to/3vfdH40
Celestron GPS Module (updates date/time/location automatically on celestron mounts): amzn.to/3kcphXe
Celestron Zoom Eyepiece Lens (surprisingly good zoom for the price): amzn.to/3LipLHm
Televue 3.5mm Nagler Eyepiece: amzn.to/3OuN7eK
Televue 7mm Nagler Eyepiece: amzn.to/38sH4XO
Televue 9mm Nagler Eyepiece: amzn.to/3vJ8791
Televue 13mm Nagler Eyepiece: amzn.to/3EJZ0co
Televue 24mm Panoptic Eyepiece: amzn.to/3rNxoxS
Televue 31mm Nagler Eyepiece (huge and heavy 2" eyepiece, but amazing): amzn.to/3xT33S4
Televue 1.25" Barlow lens (2x, doubles magnification of eyepiece): amzn.to/3vdRza8
Televue 1.25" Diagonal: amzn.to/3ENJNaf
Celestron 2" SCT Diagonal: amzn.to/3MtMVKX
Televue 2" Diagonal: bit.ly/3ODIlf5
Televue 2" Visual Back for SCT Telescopes (to use a 2" diagonal): bit.ly/3xWMBQW
DGM Optics NPB filter (great narrow-band light-pollution filter): bit.ly/3ETsBPg
Optolong L-Pro filter (another great filter): amzn.to/3o4VilB
Really nice large planisphere for helping to find night sky objects: amzn.to/3OBZPIM
Astronomy Books:
Concise Catalog of Deep-Sky Objects: amzn.to/3kdEW8D
The Backyard Astronomer's Guide: amzn.to/3KhfsSD
The 21st Century Atlas of the Moon: amzn.to/36KLSqO
Turn Left at Orion: amzn.to/3LgobG3
Sky & Telescope's Pocket Star Atlas: amzn.to/3vf1EDH
Death by Black Hole and other Cosmic Quandries: amzn.to/36M3Pp5
Weather Books:
The Ultimate Guide to America's Weather: amzn.to/3vjVzG0
Extreme Weather-A Guide and Record Book: amzn.to/38smoyP
Meteorology Today: amzn.to/3ENgaFY
Weather Stations:
Davis Instruments Weather Station: amzn.to/3vf715R
Davis Instruments Vantage Vue Weather Station (cheaper option): amzn.to/3K9LHD6
Weatherflow Weather Station: amzn.to/3EJWkLX
Video and Audio Gear:
Rode Wireless Mic: amzn.to/3KhNlCy
Shure MV88 Portable iOS Microphone (Great external microphone for iPhone): amzn.to/3LmWw67
Smartphone vlogging kit: amzn.to/3rTXyPf
Selfie Mirror to see phone screen when recording self with back cameras: amzn.to/3KiCgRU
Canon SL3 (nice basic DSLR): amzn.to/3kdBHy1
LED light panels: amzn.to/36NZBNy
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Thanks for the video. I use Sky Safari often. I will try that.
What you can use to save money and time for the mount is a car mount. They have suction cups to stick to tube and a stiff movable arm that holds its position but can also move any direction the smallest amount. Lastly the phone mount is a clamp so it'll work with most all phones. No special proprietary mounts needed!
Wow. What a great idea. I purchased a fairly expansive camera clamp mount for the eyepiece and it really sucks.
I think that your idea is far superior and I'm gonna go get one today. Thanks
It wouldn’t stick to a curved surface
my experience with both sky safari, and skeye, is that the tracking is so poor and inconsistent that the phone is only useful for displaying this type of thing as a chart for reference. it's convenient to have a chart mounted like that, which turns with the telescope. i remember many years ago i tried getting into astronomy using paper charts, and it was very frustrating, i was always losing my points of reference and getting lost. with it mounted like this though with motion tracking (inaccurate as it may be), it's much more intuitive.
the thing you mentioned about how if you turn your telescope to a far different part of the sky then it throws it off is exactly what i experienced with skeye, even after aligning several targets. you can align it with something like polaris, pan around a bit close to polaris, and you can come back to it and it's fine. turn the telescope around to the opposite side of the sky to look at the moon for a moment, and then come back to polaris and it's way off. phone sensors just aren't accurate enough for this to work. maybe they'll be better in the future but right now they're mediocre for this application.
Agreed. Its a _rough_ polar alightment forsure.
Skeye needs “regular” alignment to star. Once aligned, it is accurate for that part of the sky. If you want an always accurate guidance, you will need an app that does plate solving often. And FinderCam app is making it possible.
Ok the final part of ur coment it's the answer, the real problem It's the inacuare sensors of the phone.
This is a great way to utilize the long exposure options of the Pro mode on many cellphones. Gonna try Orion with 3x lens of my S22ultra.
Great tip.👍
Superb cool telescope 🔭❤️ dear, thank you for informational video... Fully enjoyed 😀💖🎁🎁🎁🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉
Thanks - I just bought a cheap ballhead to have a go at this!
Thanks!!!
You can now with Astrohopper and it's free, as it doesn't really on the compass (click the hand icon) and therefore does not get thrown off by it's proximity to metal and electronics
Very nice!
Can this piggyback adapter work on a Starblast 4.5? Can it be put between the red dot finder and the Starblast? If not, are there piggyback mounts that work for the Starblast?
Great article on using cell phone with NexStar 6 SE. I have the same scope. However, could you describe the dovetail mount you 3D printed. I would like to do same thing. Is it on Thingiverse? If so, what key word should I use? Thanks, Don
What will be great in the future is true AR with real time astrometric solving (through telescope optic of course, phone cameras are not good enough). That could be a poor man's "Go-to"
Even better... would be if this application could be mounted to the eyepiece to aim the telescope, then to switch to another application and record a photo through the same ocular.
@@toml.8210 Yes!
Celestron's Star Sense scopes use iPhones and plate solving now and they're rather inexpensive to boot. Hopefully it's a testbed for greater things to come
I guess the metal parts that are on the scope are responsible for causing compass errors on the phone especially with a large movement of the scope. If the phone is mounted on plastic and a larger distance from the scope it would have a smaller effect.
Also, it would be useful if the app had an offset function instead of fine tuning the mount.
Yep, the metal is the main issue.
Pretty sure it should be possible to use a camera connected to a phone to replace starsense.
Using the phone to control the telescope and process the image.
The new Celestron star sense explorer scopes do just that. But for now they don’t sell the adapter by itself to use on your existing scopes. Basically you have to buy one of those scopes, take the phone adapter and mirror module thingy off and then attach it to your existing mount or scope.
I just got a budget telescope and it is fine for the cost, no complaints except the phone mount it comes with has sucker pads instead of a phone holder.
Hi. I would like to go a step further. Is it possible to use your smartphone as an auto-guider camera? And if so, how'd you connect it? Thanks in advance and greatings from Sevilla, Spain.
I think that would be challenging to do. Mainly, I'm not sure that there is any way to connect the camera output of the phone to whatever mount system or computer you are using. Maybe someone could figure out how to do that with something like an ASI air pro or whatever, but you can use pretty inexpensive cameras as auto guider cameras, so I don't think there would be much demand for anyone to develop the software to do that. A lot of times people eventually upgrade their main camera and then use an older one as the autoguider camera and things like that as well.
I love startracker app feature on the celestron starsense explorer which makes me wonder why they don't create a universal mount piece this for all scopes.
I have also wondered if there could be a way of hacking a telrad finder using the additional dew shield 90° mirrored version? 🤔
I'm hoping this is where you say "challenge accepted" 🤣
No sure why, but I can not change FOV in AR in SkySafari 7 Pro on iPhone. Whenever I click different FOV in AR, nothing happens. In Compass it works, but compass does not have compass offset feature like AR.
AR mode is wonky a lot for me as well.
Im suffering I'm doing homemade one but I use a Rope to hold the phone holder. It's was stressful to align because it move so much
. So I gave up. I live on level 8 bortle sky. I use manual reflector telescope.its hard to locate Orion nebula because of the pollution. I have questions. How to detect a deep sky object like Orion nebula with out go to mount or phone finderscope?
Pretty much you will need to reference a star chart. I like these: skymaps.com/downloads.html as you can print one out each month and the objects it lists on the chart are ones you can see from Bortle 8 skies (which I’m in as well). It only shows the brighter stars which tend to match what you can see in your sky with light pollution. You still need a finder of some type on the telescope that is aligned well so you can point your scope and then the lowest power, widest field of view eyepiece you can use in the scope to located the object. If you don’t have a finder at all on your scope I would get a Telrad finder like this: t.ly/rJ7Qe they are only about $35 and work well and you just stick them to your telescope with double sided tape (included).
Could you use it for a Dobsonian telescope? I have a Apertura 8"
Honestly, the best thing to do is to try to buy one of the cheapest Celestron starsense explorer telescopes that use your phones camera to plate solve and find things with the Celestron app. Then remove it from that scope and attach it to your dob. You might have to either drill a couple mounting holes or rig up some other attachment bracket (maybe an adapter for the finder mount?) but that system works pretty well.
Can you attach phone to guide telescope to target accurately with plate solving?
Celestron does that with their starsense app now but you have to get a special code you only get with a telescope purchase to use it. I’m not sure if anyone else has made a plate solving app for a phone yet that works similar.
FinderCam does. It does not need a special code to work for the time being.
which alt az mount are you using?
That was an explore scientific twilight II mount.
does it have to be the SkySafari Pro version ? can I do it with basic version or plus version ????
No, any version will work about the same. What would be great would be if Celestron would release the mount system for using a phone and the Celestron version of sky safari to find objects with any telescope. That system works well but you can only use it with specific telescopes and mounts by Celestron. It is possible, however, that there are some limitations on how well that system works, just like using sky safari on a phone mount, based on how much metal and what kind, is in the mount and telescope.
Great idea, I needed a mount idea, there are better apps for free though. Ah never mind I see this is a 5 year old post.
Yeah you can toss all of this now. Much better phone tech these days.
Can you use it on a dobsonian
I’ve never tried it on a dob. In general it is sensitive to being next to metal (messes with the compass) so depends on what the tube is made of. at this point I would try to get celestron’s starsense device that allows you to use your phone as a go to computer. They don’t sell it separate, but sell it mounted to their dobs and other scopes. So you can buy one of their cheaper scopes and remove it and put it on the dob.
I would take some pictures with the iPhone while it’s on there. On night mode
I doubt you would get more than a few stars depending on ur light pollution. Even with the nicest phone cameras, i could be wrong however
@@Handles-R-Lame Check YT for Astrophotography With iPhone, you'll be amazed at what people are doing.
In my experiences I would say this is a pretty poor option.
Stellarium.....
this will only work on the newest devices, because you will need certain sensor for detecting magnetic fields, angles, etc. with great precision. Cheap or old smartphones won't have those sensors.
Unfortunately neither will a new phone / tablet after its been dropped a few times, which does tend to happen every now and again. It throws off the sensors completely, even if you try to recalibrate it through system/advanced/google or other third party services/settings. I have however only attempted it through skysafari and stellarium but both results 1/10 in usefulness.
Buy a better mount
KIDS ESA
EUROPE SPASE AGENCY
Too many “sort of”s to suit me
Yeah, I wouldn't really recommend it, but if you already have the phone, a tripod mount for your phone, and a celestron camera mount for your telescope, it can be nice to have it to see what is around the general area you are pointed. It is not going to consistently work for go-to.. Celestron has the mounts now for some small scopes that allow you to use your phone for the go-to functionality. I hope they make a general adapter you can put on any telescope and allow the software to work with mount instead of having it be paired to the mount you buy.
40 bucks for an app....
Crazy right?