M31 is located using FinderCam and shot by Daniel Mendell
A digital finder scope for telescope, binocular and naked eye. Latest demo video is recorded in March 19, 2023 at https://youtu.be/md9LDchUuzU. In this video, I use FinderCam to find some bright stars and M42 Orion Nebula instantly. It shows the 2 steps star alignments that lead user accurately to the target.
Benefits:
- Display more stars than the naked eye can see. It uses stacking and image processing to make more stars visible.
- It saves you many frustrating hours finding your deep sky objects.
- Attach phone to telescope and it can leads you to 110 Messier deep sky objects accurately. Planets and bright stars.
- It works in heavily light polluted cities where there is only 1 or 2 stars in the partial cloudy night sky. The special about this app is that it uses only one bright star alignment to guide users to target.
Requirements:
- For most telescope, you need a basic phone adapter. If you are using a binocular, you will need a L mount.
- You will need mount with slow motion control like Dobsonian telescope or slow motion tripod. The app requires you to move a crosshair to target.
Note:
Like a finder scope, you need to align FinderCam to telescope.
- Add automatic alignment to nearby bright star within 10 degree of target.
- Add another fine alignment when user pointing reaches within 1 degree of target.
By using a 2 alignments method, this version of FinderCam greatly improve the telescope guiding accuracy. It can be shown on the latest demo video at https://youtu.be/md9LDchUuzU
- This version also fix some bugs that are recently reported by some new users as followed
1. Camera image does not show in iPhone 13 Pro but works in iPhone 11.
2. The Model and Search button does not work in samller iPhone SE screen as they are covered by the sky model.