NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: Learn the stars, by phone
From: Frank Reed
Date: 2009 May 14, 06:27 -0700
From: Frank Reed
Date: 2009 May 14, 06:27 -0700
George, Sorry I didn't include any links previously. First of all, here's a nice article describing the technology of the Celestron Skyscout: http://www.eetimes.com/news/latest/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=198700125 (be sure to continue to the second page of the article). This is the "niche market" astronomy toy that I was talking about. And here's the main Celestron page for the product: http://www.celestron.com/skyscout/ This thing does just what it says. You take it out of the box, put in the AA batteries, turn it on, point it at a star, and it tells you just what you're looking at. It requires only a few seconds of automatic initialization. There's no user alignment process. The Skyscout appeared on the market two or three years ago. It's fairly expensive, and it can't even make phone calls. :-) As you can see from the EEtimes article above, it includes a GPS chipset, two magnetic chipsets, and accelerometer chipsets. With the output from those, it can determine where you're pointing in the sky from anywhere on Earth at any date and time (probably limited to a few decades out for planet positions) with an accuracy of about 0.5 degrees. Clearly, as you suggested, if there's significant magnetic or acceleration interference (you wouldn't want to use it inside an iron carousel), then it would have problems. But I've seen a Skyscout in operation and tried it myself. It's not bothered by minor magnetic interference and its own batteries are obviously a significant source of magnetic field which apparently cause no problems. How? I don't know. But I'm more interested in the educational aspects of this than its technology (which is OT in any case). This technology, patented by Celestron (will other companies have to license it?) is about to become much more widespread. It can be squeezed into modern smart phones without too much trouble. Many phones, including the iPhone, already include accelerometers (for games and phone functions -e.g. in one phone, if the phone is placed face-down in a call, the caller is put on hold). Many phones have standard GPS now. A few days ago, I had the experience of parking at a local store and I glanced down at the GPS display on my phone. I was running Google Maps so it was showing me a satellite view of the parking lot with a little dot marking my position. I laughed because it showed me in the third parking spot when I had parked in the second. Then I stepped out of the car, looked again, and realized that the phone knew where I was better than I did. The evidence for this magnetic compass technology in the next iPhone release appeared over the past few months. From the CNET article: "Rumors first floated a month ago that there would be a magnetometer built in to the next version of the iPhone. Now there appear to be corroborating screenshots, which BoyGeniusReport has obtained. The images show a debugging menu with the option to "show in compass," that is purportedly going to show up when the upgraded iPhone debuts. One of the interesting things you can do with a digital compass is introduce augmented reality-type applications, as MacRumors suggests. Mobile augmented reality can use a phone's camera and compass to let a device capture an image of a location, like San Francisco's Union Square, for example. Information from the compass would allow names of locations to pop up on top of the image. While this would be new for the iPhone and for Apple, others (like Nokia) have been working on this exact type of mobile application for several years. HP Labs has also looked at the usefulness of mobile augmented reality. A digital compass also allows for the iPhone to catch up to the G1's capability of doing Google Maps in "compass mode." In the Street View mode, as you move the phone around, so does the view of the map." (that's most of the text --the original web page loads very slowly) So again, consider the implications for celestial navigation education. Within a short period of time, we can expect a significantly larger number of people to come to the table with some good star identification skills in hand. It's just a matter of time... -FER --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ Navigation List archive: www.fer3.com/arc To post, email NavList@fer3.com To , email NavList-@fer3.com -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---