Hi gentlemen
Is there anyone connecting vizy to telescope to have an external pc control?
Wiring details will be welcome.
App will be released?
Thanks in advance
Hello,
We expect the first versions of the astronomy app to be out this summer. Sorry for the delays – we’re running a bit behind schedule with the software development.
What do you mean by “external pc control”?
Edward
Hello,
The astronomy app will control the telescope mount if it’s motorized and has serial input/control. We are targeting the Celestron NexStar (alt-az) mounts first. What telescope mount are you using?
Edward
I have Celestron NexStar 127SLT, happy to see it in your target
Hello Edge has there been any developments been dragged away by busy stuff now back to look at this a bit again for a bit?
love to hear where things have got to.
Jim
Hello,
Our apologies, the Astronomy application is overdue. We’ve been focused on other things (improving CNN performance, adding texting support), but we do plan on working on the Astronomy application after we get this next release out, which will be before the end of the year.
We do have basic motion control of the Celestron NexStar series working – this is fairly recent. To give me a better idea of your specific needs/wants –
What type of telescope do you plan on using with Vizy?
What kinds of objects do you want to visualize the most? (e.g. planets, galaxies, nebulae)
Edward
I have a suggestion, that might be a good first step, put in a solar eclipse mode.
It should work with a static scope. if I pull out in scope once in ten years I ain’t got that figured out.
It should save the data such that it can be post processed with some widely available tools.
Hello,
I think solar astronomy is often overlooked. You are interested in gathering images during the solar eclipse? What are you interested in imaging? The timelapse, the corona, (?)
Edward
I was thinking just a time lapse, but I was also just trying to think of a simple minimum base that you could start the project with. Rather than jumping for the all of the complication of a goto scope, get images off of a locked scope. the really high end is filled with cooled ccd cameras, so you have to have a painless imaging handling solution,
And get it working before April.
Hello,
Taking time lapse with a short lens is seems to be popular so that you capture larger sections of the sky. What are you wanting to capture?
Edward
Hello
Sounds like you are making some progress. I have a Celestron Nexstar 8i. Still learning how to use it but making some progress. I think that I mentioned earlier that the ability to collect stacked images for lower light image collection. Binning is something I have also read about that can improve image collection sensitivity from what I understand ythe camera sensor has that capability inherent to it.
Jim
Hi Jim,
I’m glad you have a Nexstar 
It’s a really great scope for the price in my opinion. “Live image stacking” is one of the things we’ll implement. Binning is on the list too as well as “plate matching”. There is an impressive amount of Python code for this kind of image processing in the community that we plan on using. The first astronomy app won’t be out quickly enough though, so my apologies. 
The next release won’t include the astronomy app, unfortunately. It will be released in early January. Work on the astronomy app will begin shortly thereafter.
Edward
In April the effort would to get the solar eclipse.
Hello,
It would be great to track the sun and create a movie. Do you have a motorized mount? Are you in Australia?
Edward
Actually it not that good of a story. I miss-read the date. I am looking at the 2024 April eclipse in the US.
But the sun is a easy target for any idiot to line the scope on. I have an old etx-90 probably not worth automating but lines up on the sun just fine. High end astro isn’t going to use your camera they want cooled CCD stuff or at least specialized to the type of astronomy they do. So you should focus on easy to setup with a low end scope, or perhaps interfacing with existing astronomy software.
I have a Celestron Nestar 6SE. It’ll auto-align and point to objects in it’s database by itself. I’d like to use the Vizy to augment that.
My wish list:
-
The Vizy able to interface / setup / auto align the scope and control it to point at known objects for visual observation. Maybe “plate matching” could be used for auto align as well as ID of what it sees?
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Integrate pointing controls with camera controls. I understand that the people really into this spend a lot of money on telescopes / controllers / cameras. But if the Vizy interface controls are straightforward enough, it could help us “occasional amateurs” make some some keeper images instead of just looking at them online. Maybe Vizy’s user interface software could recommend / auto select an imaging approach / camera setup based on what the telescope is pointing at?
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Planetary imaging seems feasible to me - I think people do this with web cam like equipment (with video capture / frame stacking?). Seeing Vizy turn a fuzzy video into a sharp image of Saturn and its rings would be a truly awesome demo.
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If Vizy could make it easy to set up, it’d also be interesting to try imaging deep sky objects with stacked longer exposures. The camera sensor may limit expectations, though.
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Sun / sunspot photos would also be a different and interesting application. The setup / auto alignment / pointing would be much different during the day. And the camera controls too. Vizy could even auto switch to this based on time of day. I’d have to get some sort of solar filter.
Like I said, I’m an “occasional amateur astronomer” so I anticipate learning things while using the Vizy astronomy app. That might even be the best part.
Ed
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Hi Ed,
This is a really good list. A motorized mount (like the Nexstar series) makes some compelling use cases possible (and the Nexstar telescopes aren’t too expensive.) Plate matching and live image stacking are on our list. It’s true that Vizy’s sensor isn’t the best sensor for low light imaging, but it can still image dim objects, although not as fast as other sensors. Vizy should be able to provide decent imagery of some popular dim objects (Crab, Orion, Dumbbell Nebulae – it’s a long list.) Of course, Saturn and Jupiter are great targets – for example, if we’re talking goals and aspirations – Vizy could create a video of Jupiter’s rotation and its moons in an automated way. We would like to also (eventually) explore taking image mosaics of objects that are larger than the field-of-view of your telescope, and then stitching the images together. This technique has the advantage of creating images that have higher resolution than your sensor. Imaging the moon in this way would be the easiest target. I think the Sun might work too. Imaging Andromeda like this would be a stretch goal. (I didn’t know this until fairly recently because I’m still a newcomer to astronomy, but Andromeda is 6 times bigger than the Moon in the night sky.)
We’re not sure how we will present the different functionalities. Will it be a single application? Maybe it will have the concept of “tasks” and you can select a task and an object, and Vizy will get busy. It will be fun to explore.
Edward
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Happy to see this item alive, looking to the stars, this month can be observed Mars, Jupiter, Saturn and Venus, just after sunset, with naked eye.
Greetings!
Is there anything you can share with us about progress on the Astronomy App?
Thanks,
Ed