Sunday, December 06, 2015
Smart Phones + Tablets + Amateur Astronomy: Where we are Now (Part I)
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| SkySafari |
Where are we now
with the devices that not only take up a substantial portion of the waking
lives of many of us, but even threaten to make laptop computers obsolete for
astronomy? Astronomy apps for smart devices are mature, have plenty of
features, and those features are highly competitive with similar laptop/PC
applications. That is not what has changed most, however. What has really changed is
that apps are big now. Astronomy apps are increasingly displayed on devices
with screens large enough to make them truly useful.
I’ve been using smart devices and their predecessors, the
PDAs (Palm Pilots, that is), for over fifteen years, but it has taken this
transition to larger displays to make them really important to me for use in our avocation. Sure, it was fun beaming Palm Pilot observing lists back and forth with
my friend Tom Wideman on the 2001 Texas Star Party
observing field, but PDA astronomy was really just fun. A Palm was not indispensible to me as a laptop had
become.
That didn’t change till just the other day. It began while I was
packing for the Peach State Star Gaze. I was finishing loading Miss Van
Pelt, my Toyota 4Runner, when my iPhone 4s rang. I fished it out of my pocket
to answer while juggling an equipment case in my other hand, fumbled, and
dropped the phone to the concrete floor of the carport. Uh-oh.
Double uh-oh, actually, since the phone was not in a case.
I’d always kept it in an Otterbox, but when that case wore out a year ago, I
hadn’t been able to find a replacement one for my “obsolete” phone locally. In
hindsight I should have ordered one off the Internet, but you know what they
say about that. I picked up the phone expecting to see a cracked screen, but
didn’t. “Huh. Guess the little sucker is tougher than I thought.”
Cut to the Deerlick Astronomy Village a day or two later.
Phone service was spotty, but I was able to get wi-fi, and thought I’d have a
look at the weather predictions for Friday night. Reached in my pocket and
grabbed the phone. Felt kinda funny. Pulled it out and examined it. Yes, the
screen was fine, but the phone’s back was a mass of cracks. It’s made of a
glass-like composite of some sort similar to the screen, and looked like it
would soon be falling to pieces and cutting a hole in my leg if I put it back
in my pocket.
It was clear I needed a new phone. The question was which?
I’ve been impressed by the Android Phones, particularly the Samsung Galaxy, but
my inclination was to stick with the iPhone, which I’ve been using for years. I
was keeping an open mind, though; I’d look at the Galaxy in the store, the ATT
store, and maybe some others—LGs in particular. Heck, I’d even consider a
Galaxy Note.
A Galaxy Note? That enormous mashup of smart phone and
tablet? Yep. I knew the reason why I wasn’t using my smart phone more for astronomy: the
screen. Wasn’t just my aging eyes, either. The minuscule display of
the 4s wasn’t large enough to make star charting apps very practical for use at the scope even for somebody with 20-20 peepers. I wanted big,
and I believed that meant the iPhone 6s Plus or the slightly larger Galaxy Note.
That’s what I thought
until I walked into the store, marched up to the counter, and told the nice and
helpful AT&T guys (alas, that cute Lily from the TV commercials was nowhere
in sight) I was thinking about was the 6s Plus. They said they could do that,
but that if I, like most dudes, carried my phone in a pocket of my jeans, I
really ought to try pocketing a 6s Plus before settling on one. I picked one up
and tried to stick it in my pocket experimentally. No way; just much too big to
carry that way. I don’t like belt cases and am too old-fashioned to start
carrying a men’s’ shoulder bag, so the Plus and the Note were clearly out.
I was disappointed, and the AT&T salespeople could see
that. They said they had a way to assuage my disappointment, though. They offered
me a good compromise. An excellent deal on an iPhone 6s (no Plus) with 64 gigs
AND an Asus 7-inch tablet with Wi-Fi plus cell-tower capability. The 6s is not as
big as a plus, but was much bigger than my 4s, and the tablet was even bigger
than the 6s Plus. I was sold.
Denouement? The phone is great. It is large enough that I
can do many things, including many astronomy things, on it happily. But it is
the tablet that has rung my chimes. The Android operating system’s way of doing
things was not that difficult for me to learn. It’s different from iOS, but not
that different, and I was soon looking at FaceBook and downloading my first Android app
from the Google Play Store, SkySafari
Plus.
There is no doubt SkySafari is and will likely remain the
premier planetarium program for smart devices for the foreseeable future. It
was out of the gate early, and its developers have continued to improve it
steadily. Newcomers like the Bisques’ TheSky for iOS (specifically designed for the
iPad) may gain ground as they mature, but for now SkySafari is it. I just
didn’t realize how it it is till I used the program on the 7-inch Tablet.
In the past. I’d used the basic version of the app on my 4s
and my old iPod Touch occasionally. Usually as an aid to identifying stars in
the gloaming. But use it to find objects or run a telescope? Nope. As above,
just too small. That was obviously going to be different on the tablet. That in
mind, I downloaded the middle version of the app, SkySafari 4 Plus. Its
extremely reasonable price, $14.99, meant that if I didn’t use it that much,
even on the tablet, I wouldn’t be out that much moola. With 2.6-million deep
sky objects and 31,000 deep sky objects, it was at least obvious Plus would be
way more powerful than the basic edition.
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| SkySafari |
As you know if you are a faithful reader, when I’ve done
visual observing lately my tendency has been “simplify, simplify, simplify,”
beginning with my switch to a 10-inch Zhumell Dobsonian, Zelda, from my truss
scope, Old Betsy. I even took it further for a short while, going back to
printed star atlases for a night or two. Which just reminded me how much I hate print star atlases. Hard for me to
read under a dim red light, hard to find stuff, and wonderful for collecting
dew. Still, I didn’t want to drag a freaking 17-inch Alienware laptop out for a
half hour jaunt across the backyard sky. Maybe there was a middleground now…
I had that tablet loaded up with what was an attractive
and legible and detailed planetarium program. Would it work for my visual
observing? Yes it would. One night with the 10-inch and the star clusters of
Cassiopeia showed that.
What was it like using the tablet and SkySafari? It was
sorta like using my old print fave, Sky
& Telescope’s Pocket Sky Atlas. But better. Mucho better. I could zoom
in as much as I needed. Search for objects easily. Get information about what I
was searching for with a touch and a swipe. Finding DSOs with the scope? The
fact that I could put a Telrad display on the screen made that duck soup. How
was the display dark adaptation-wise? In night vision red it was just right for
the backyard. I might want a red film filter over the screen at a dark site,
though. We’ll see.
Will I be ditching my laptop anytime soon, though? Probably
not. Oh, I might if I could but I can’t yet, and likely neither will you.
Unless you opt for a Windows capable tablet you are stuck for a couple of
reasons. There is no way to control a DSLR or CCD with a tablet or phone
without having a laptop in the mix, not yet, not that I am aware of. I have
little doubt that will happen, but not yet. Also, as you know, I am a big fan
user of planning programs for astronomy. While there are a couple of
rudimentary apps of this type for smart devices, there’s no Deep Sky Planner or
SkyTools, not yet. I’m sure there eventually will be, however, and am frankly astonished that a
powerful one hasn’t appeared yet.
To put it mildly, I was sold on the efficacy of the new
larger screen devices for actual field use in astronomy, and began installing
old and new apps on both the 6s and the tablet. What do I have installed and
what am I using most? Here’s the first batch…
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| SkyWeek Plus |
SkySafari
As above, SkySafari is on the top of the heap when it comes
to planetarium programs for phones and tablets. It even has some (fairly
rudimentary) list making tools. It is beautiful and it is detailed. If you
don’t want to settle for the couple of million stars and thirty thousand DSOs
of Plus, you can up the ante with the Pro version ($39.95), which boasts 27
million stars and over a million faint fuzzies. Believe me, this thing gives up
nothing to PC planetariums.
One thing that gave me pause when I was preparing to buy the
Android version was that I’d heard its performance is not quite as good on that
platform as on iOS. It is even stated on the maker’s (Curriculum Simulations)
website that the app may run slower on Android devices than on iOS ones. That
may be, but the program runs incredibly well on my humble Asus tablet; I don’t
notice any performance difference between Plus on my Android widget and the
basic version on the iPhone.
One other concern some may have regarding the Android
version is that you cannot utilize Sky-Fi, the Wi-Fi system sold by Curriculum
Simulations for wireless control of scopes with SkySafari. Unless you “root” (jail-break)
your phone, you are out of luck. Android devices do not normally support ad-hoc
Wi-Fi networks. The only other out is carrying a Wi-Fi router to the observing
field with you, and who wants to do that?
Luckily there is a non-Wi-Fi alternative for wireless scope
control, the company’s new SkyBT, which allows you to wirelessly control the
scope via Bluetooth widget. Not only does it, I understand, work well and
reliably, it is slightly cheaper than the SkyFi system at $99.95 versus
$109.95. I haven’t thought much about doing this yet, since I am going through
an astrophotography phase and need a laptop in the field, but I might someday.
SkyWeek
Everybody needs to keep up on what’s going on with the sky
week-in, week-out. You can do that with various websites, but why not make it
easy on yourself? This little app from Sky
& Telescope is updated weekly and keeps you apprised of and alerted to sky
happenings (the Plus version can sync with your device’s calendar). Not only do
you get a listing of interesting events, clicking on them will bring up a
little built-in planetarium app (based on SkySafari). Yes, if you are a
SkySafari user the basic version of SkyWeek is built-in to that app, but I find
it handy to have the standalone version, too. It’s certainly cheap enough to
allow even stingy me to do that. The basic SkyWeek is free and the Plus variant
is a mere $2.99 (iOS or Android).
Accuweather Astronomy
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| Accuweather page |
Even before I got my large-screen smart thingies, I did use
my devices in astronomy rather frequently for one thing, checking the weather,
the weather as it pertains to observing. Will it be cloudy or clear? How about
the transparency? Seeing? Normally I use the apps below for that, but I’ve
recently found a rather nice webpage on the Accuweather site, “Accuweather
Astronomy.” It provide stuff like Moon phase and rise/set info, but also, most
interestingly, boils down the weather forecast for your current location into
“poor/fair/good/very good/excellent for stargazing.” I find its predictions to
be quite accurate much of the time.
Scope Nights
A step up from Accuweather is a nice app that also condenses
the forecast into “good/bad for observing,” but in a somewhat easier to use
fashion. No messing with your browser, just click an icon. I like ScopeNights
and have been using it since someone
turned me onto it at a star party a couple of years ago. Only thing I don’t
like about it? It is iOS only. How accurate is it? As accurate as anything
else. Like every other weather app, whether for astronomy or not, there are
misses as well as hits.
Clear Sky Droid and
MyCSC
These apps display the famous astronomy conditions predictor
Clear Sky Charts (nee Clear Sky Clock). Both are much the same in that you can save
your favorite sites and get the CSC graphic display of predicted conditions for
them for the night. MyCSC is a little prettier than Clear Sky Droid, but in the end
they do exactly the same thing, display that CSC bar graph. I prefer Clear Sky
Droid, but only because of the larger display of my tablet. Is CSC more
accurate for astronomy than other weather sources? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Like ScopeNights and
Accuweather, there are times when it is on the money and other times when it is
dismally wrong, but that is the nature of weather prognostication.
There is one other weather app (for Android) that I like and
which seems to have a lot of promise, Astro
Panel, which uses the 7Timer service for weather data and tailors that to
astronomy. When it works. Which is seldom. I usually only get “Sorry, problem
connecting to 7timer service.” I’m hoping this one will get fixed out one of
these days.
What else? I have some more interesting apps lined up for
you, including one that, if I get it working might be very, very interesting, Universe2Go. Let us leave all that for
next week or possibly the week after, though. Right now, I hope to get out and
do something I haven’t done in months, actually observe the deep sky from my
club dark site and report on that.
Addendum: Saying Goodbye to Betsy…
If you are a Facebook friend of mine, this won't surprise
you because you probably noticed I recently posted that I was selling my
time-honored 12-inch truss tube Dobsonian, Old Betsy. Why in the name of all that is holy would I do something like
that? If there’s any telescope that I’ve been identified with over the years
other than C8s, it has been that stalwart old Newtonian.
The basic reason was simple. She just wasn’t being used. The
last time the scope cruised the night sky was at the 2014 Deep South Regional
Star Gaze, and after my acquisition of a 10-inch solid tube Dob, Zelda, the chances of me getting Bets under the
stars anytime soon seemed remote. The
10-inch has a good mirror and is much quicker and easier to get going in the
backyard. Another reason for saying “sayonara” was that I am at a time in my
life when I don’t want to feel encumbered,
tied down by things, big things, I don’t need and don’t use.
So Betsy had to find a new home. While I did mention
the telescope’s availability on the FB Newsfeed, I really wanted to sell her
locally and never got as far as posting an ad on AstroMart. Frankly, I let her
go for a very modest sum, but that made sense. I would not have dared to try to
ship her. She’d have to be “pickup only,” or I might, I thought, deliver her within
a reasonable 300 – 350-mile radius. While I probably could have gotten some
bites on that, I would have had to spend gas money on a delivery, and at the
extreme end of that range I’d probably have wanted to stay the night in a motel
before returning home.
So, I let her go for less than I maybe should have, but I
believe she has gone to someone who will use and respect her, and I certainly
got my money out of her over two decades of use and fun. I am so glad that the last time I used her was to revisit and
complete the observing list I used with Betsy on her first star party outing in
‘94. I think that will provide a little closure for me.
Was it easy to let go? No. I set her up in the backyard to
demonstrate for the buyers, a young couple, and while waiting for them to
arrive I turned Betsy to M15. The image in my 8mm Ethos was crazy-good and all
the memories of all the nights Bets and I spent under the stars together came
flooding back. I began to doubt whether I could
let her leave. In the end, good sense prevailed. I have my memories, and Bets
is better off being used and cared for.
That is not the end of my selling either. If you know anyone
who wants a high-toned standard C8, an
RV-6, or a StarBlast, send them my way. For the reasons above, these scopes
simply must go to new homes as well. But don’t be afraid. I am not shutting
down my observing—not hardly. While a bunch of scopes will go before I am done,
Betsy at least has been replaced by a new one that I think I will use a lot. What
is that? All shall be revealed over the next couple of Sundays, friends.
Comments:
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I have used SkySafari to control my mount since it came out. Another app that works very well plus has additional features like improving pointing is Astromist. Triatlas is a great chart app that is essentially Uranometria on a screen. I use an iPad mini now but I did use an iPod for a few years. More screen real estate helps but not absolutely necessary.
In terms of Ole Betsy, I sold my dobs, a 13.1 and 16", for $800 for the pair. They were taking up space in my garage and I had not used either for a couple of years. Mallincams will do that. The giveaway price was to move them out and I did not want to ship them and no one would buy one as the shipping would exceed what the scopes were worth. I had them for 25 years so I had used them well, the 16" in particular. I am culling the herd further, unloading a StarBlast 4.5" and Lunt Ha solar scope as they just don't get used. I like to describe it as "maturing" my scope collection. Of all the scopes I have bought and sold I miss my SC8 the most. .....Dwight
In terms of Ole Betsy, I sold my dobs, a 13.1 and 16", for $800 for the pair. They were taking up space in my garage and I had not used either for a couple of years. Mallincams will do that. The giveaway price was to move them out and I did not want to ship them and no one would buy one as the shipping would exceed what the scopes were worth. I had them for 25 years so I had used them well, the 16" in particular. I am culling the herd further, unloading a StarBlast 4.5" and Lunt Ha solar scope as they just don't get used. I like to describe it as "maturing" my scope collection. Of all the scopes I have bought and sold I miss my SC8 the most. .....Dwight
Another weather app I really like is "Dark Sky"
It gives you an easy to follow hour by hour breakdown of upcoming weather conditions.
It's not astronomy specific, but I find it as good as any.
It's also somewhat crowdsourced and smart about predicting local weather.
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It gives you an easy to follow hour by hour breakdown of upcoming weather conditions.
It's not astronomy specific, but I find it as good as any.
It's also somewhat crowdsourced and smart about predicting local weather.
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