The Universe in Your Hands: Astromist Updated

If you are a hardcore astronomy buff you probably already know about Astromist, but if you are a casual stargazer, and overall huge fan of outer space (and who isn’t!) you need to know about this application. From the little blurb on PalmGear, Astromist (yes, it’s really spelled this way) doesn’t look like much. About a year ago I downloaded it along with a few others thinking that I wanted a good star chart to geek around with. When I started poking around my jaw dropped…and kept dropping. I think at one point I said “holy @#$!” and passed out. I’ve been impressed with what programmers can do with the Palm, but until you’ve seen Astromist you ain’t seen nothing!

This is the universe in your hand. Star fields as deep and detailed as you wish to see. Live panning of the night sky, detailed moon and mars maps, comet finder, satellite finder, and a bunch of other stuff that looks really cool but I don’t know what it is!

Apparently you can run your Bluetooth enabled telescope from your Palm with Astromist (I didn’t even know telescopes were Bluetooth enabled?!). Take a look at the site, he has lots of screen shots to give you a very good idea what you are getting.

Over the years I’ve owned a couple of desktop astronomy apps like Red Shift and Star Gazer, and this really come close to rivaling them, and in fact in my opinion it surpasses them because it’s on the Palm!

Here is a list of some of the things Astromist does (from Astromist site); glance over it, then get the demo and check it out. The demo is actually a free version of the app that works fully but with some feature limitations. The full version cost all of $36. But be forewarned; to get all the cool stuff you’ll need about 500MB of card space (totally worth it!):

------ From Astromist Site

Based on complete catalogs (up to 2,5million of stars and 18200 deep sky objects), Astromist helps the beginners on astronomy (as well as the experienced one) to prepare and realize their observation sessions.

Astromist provides several sky maps which let the end-user find easily position of the stars, planets, comets or sky objects (M. Messier catalog, Caldwell, Hershell, SAC, SAO, NGC, IC, Hipparchos, Abell, etc.).

Furthermore, if you want to control your telescope with your PDA, Astromist is done for you. It controls most of the telescopes available nowadays (meade, celestron, takahasi, losmandy, Astrophysic, ouranos, bbox, ..) and provides GPS control to locate you automatically on the earth!
Using Astromist sky maps, Two stars alignment has been never made so easy. For more advanced astronomers, Astromist is the only assistant on Palm PDA to provide several stars alignment methods to get accurate telescope pointing (home dobson with encoder or commercial mount).

At last, Astromist is designed to help astronomer to organize efficiently his observation sessions by answering some usual questions:

• Could I see this object tonight? If it isn't the case, what will be the best period to observe it?
• Tonight what will be the obvious galaxies with my telescope?
• Could I fully see M31 using my 18mm eyepiece?
• I plan to do a one-hour observation session tonight. What will be the objects I could see during this time frame?
• Is this object easy to see or not?
• Tonight considering I have this mountain in front of me, what objects will be higher in the sky?
• What is the easiest object to observe tonight? And the more difficult?
• How can I find this object if my mount is not aligned?
• What object could I see easily using a Ploss 10mm and my telescope? Astromist is able to answer quickly to these questions and to more complex one if all the constraints are mixed together:
• I would like to point my 400mm telescope during the next hour to see all obvious nebulae which are in the constellation of the Swan and which will fill my 20mm eyepiece? __"Everything in the palm of your hand" Such was the guiding principle of the design of Astromist.

A great set of functionalities

• Bluetooth and infrared telescope control. Special rebate available for Astromist register users for the complete AirCable bluetooth hardware solution.
• Up to 2,5 million of stars and 18200 deep sky objects using full catalogs,
• More than 14000 object Dreyer descriptions including a Translator to facilitate understanding,
• More than 9000 images of deep sky objects and moon or mars features,
• High resolution to display complete sky maps:
- Maps or Azimithal views,
- - 320x480 or 480x320 modes,
- - True Full Screen Mode on T3 (no more Toolbar),
- - Object size, shape and orientation,
- - Stars colors and sizes,
- - Optional eyepiece field of view,
- - Optional CCD field of view,
- - Several zoom level,
- - Grid with fine graduations,
- - Star magnitude legend,
- - Optional Telrad,
- - Several scope utilities to control, GoTo, improve pointing etc.

• Support many scope drivers (LX200, Autostar, Nexstar, Losmandy, Takahashy, DaveEk, SiderealTechnology, etc),
• GPS compatible to get observer position and elevation using cradle or Bluetooth port,
• Scope Assistant to control your scope using palm keys,
• Camera Assistant to control your Canon DSLR camera,
• Jupiter Assistant to get red spot, satellites or events (shadows, eclipse, etc) ephemeris,
• Moon Assistant including calendar and virtual map (more than 900 craters, 3 levels of zoom, up to 1800x1800 pixels),
• Mars assistant including 3D view, map, satellite simulator,
• Earth satellite simulator,
• Comet and Asteroid assistant (3D view, position, sky path display, etc),
• Alignment Assistant to help you to align your equatorial mount,
• CCD Assistant to compute your CCD field of view and display it inside SkyChart,
• CheckList Assistant (based on SAC checklist) to brig everything with you each time,
• Location Assistant to set up to 3 preferred location settings,
• Finder Assistant to easily browse objects,
• High precision computation algorithm based on the famous Novas library for refraction and topographic position correction (earth aberration, precession and notation) considering temperature and pressure,
• Two stars alignment feature to quickly go to object even if you don't polar align your mount,
• Two of N stars alignment process to point better than one minute,
• Messier and planets photos,
• More than 7 selections criteria to drill down sky objects databases (Messier, Caldwell, Hershell, SAC, SAO, IC, NGC, Planets, Bright Stars, user defined),
• Multiple stage selection process to refine selected objects,
• Visual charts to see rise and set,
• Visual chart to see best observation period in the year,
• Visual chart to see if object is easy to see or not considering its size, magnitude, scope dimensions and sky brightness,
• Rise, transit and set with adjustable horizon constraints,
• Magnitude, type, constellation of planet and objects,
• Equatorial, Azimuth position,
• Several Night modes,
• And many more like import/export functions, custom-made object catalogs support, etc.