Can you add calibration function? Then automatic search can work with only 1 sensor - accelerometer. Many phones have only an accelerometer.
Once calibrated (say with North Horizon or a known object) all movements of the phone can be tracked using accelerometer readings and the current position and orientation can be calculated and used for automated search of an object.
Hey, thanks for the suggestion.
But it is not possible to do this without two sensors: accelerometer and magnetometer.
One helps find altitude, while the other helps with the azimuth.
For using SkEye with phones that don’t have the requisite sensors, I am working on a feature called remote sensors:
https://www.reddit.com/r/skeye/wiki/remote-sensors
The feature is in beta, but it seems to work well and will graduate from beta very soon.
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AdminHarshad (Developer, SkEye) commented
I am still not sure how it would work. The accelerometer can't provide the azimuth (heading) of the phone. If you turn the phone / telescope around the azimuth, the accelerometer will not change its output.
Are you sure your technique will work even without the azimuth reading?
thanks,
Harshad -
Anonymous commented
Actually you can use a local ephemerides to determine actual position of a known object in the sky, point the device to that object and set (i.e calibrate) the device. So if the device has only an accelerometer, every time you want to use your app you first calibrate and then use.