AstroHelm

About AstroHelm

Find galaxies, nebulae and stars with your existing telescope. AstroHelm uses fast on-device plate solving to turn smartphones into precision push-to telescope finders.

In the maker’s words

Hello HN! As an amateur astronomer living in New York City, finding objects in the night sky has always been a huge challenge. I thought about using the smartphone's gyroscope and magnetometer, but the accuracy left a lot to be desired. Then I learned about plate solving: given a picture of the sky, we can determine exactly where in the sky the camera was pointing by identifying the star pattern. This was a much better fit - as long as the phone and the optics are rigidly connected, we can repeatedly photograph the sky and determine the pointing direction with very high accuracy. A lot of work was done to design an algorithm that works reliably with smartphone cameras, which have limited light sensitivity and wider field of view which includes buildings and trees. I experimented a lot with machine learning, and to my surprise, traditional CV methods actually performed better at extractin…

Where people found it

• Hacker NewsShow HN: AstroHelm – Use your phone camera to aim a telescope or telephoto lens43 points13 comments3 days ago