26 June 2021
Accuracy of SkEye Cam
I have created a new app called SkEye Cam. It's a Camera App targeted at hobbyist astronomers (such as myself), and its highlight feature at launch will be real-time plate-solving.
Plate-solving is the act of figuring out which part of the sky has been captured on a camera plate (image). This can not only help identify objects in the image, it can also help find the orientation of a telescope, which in turn can be used for navigation, etc.
Compared to raw IMU sensors, plate-solving has the promise of being more accurate and reliable. But exactly how accurate can it be?
We decided to find out.
17 April 2011
SkEye now has an API
This post might interest you if you are an Android app developer. I have created an API for SkEye that other applications can use.
There are three functions that are supported by this API:
- searching for any object present in SkEye's database,
- viewing a position specified by RA / Dec,
- details about the position and object viewed in SkEye at the time of quitting
All these APIs use the power of Android's Intent feature to exchange data with SkEye.
26 Feb 2011
SkEye : Ideas for phone mounts
I get a lot of reports of people using SkEye with their telescopes. Here, I am collecting all the different ways that phones have been mounted with the telescope body (OTA) so that you could derive your own ideas from them.
24 Oct 2010
Publishing apps on Android
Woohoo; managed to publish my first app on the Android Market!
I was stumped with this error for a long time:
24 Oct 2010
DSC test for Android
As I began to add support for Digital Setting Circles (DSC) into my SkEye app, I thought the first step is to get the communication right. That is, the communication between the DSC and the phone, over bluetooth.
I built a separate app for doing this and figured, hey, this could be useful to others as well. Perhaps, to test your setup or simply to learn how your DSC communicates.
28 Dec 2010
Introducing SkEye
SkEye is a Planetarium for Android. It is similar to Google Sky Map, but designed to work with telescopes. It lets you use your phone as a PUSHTO guide without needing any other equipment.
There is now a dedicated website for SkEye.
