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sky-map-team / stardroid

Sky Map (formerly Google Sky Map, open sourced in 2012)
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.android.stardroid&hl=en
Apache License 2.0
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"Overlay mode" using the camera #140

Open naoliv opened 8 years ago

naoliv commented 8 years ago

Could we have a mode where the chart is overlapped with the camera image? With this we could use the camera to aim at something and also have a translucent/transparent sky map.

jaydeetay commented 8 years ago

It'll probably come eventually, but there are a couple of reasons why right now it probably wouldn't be as good as you might think: 1) Phone cameras aren't very sensitive - apart from the moon and streetlights you won't see much 2) There's enough of an error in the orientation that I don't think things will line up all that well. First we need to have the ability to calibrate the phone to correct for misalignment (?) of the sensor.

I can't fix 1. I can fix 2. Until that's done I think an overlay mode would be disappointing.

Bonehead82 commented 8 years ago

I contacted a developer(?) through email about this same thing. I even went out to the middle of nowhere on a moonless night to test my S7 and I could see the whole Milky Way with my naked eye, but my phone could not pick up even the brightest stars.

I think for this to work, you'd have to basically have a top of the line camera connected to what essentially would be a small telescope to get the resolution required. Once that was done, you might be able to feed the data back to your phone or a VR set, and THEN you'd have to find a way to move the camera using your phone alignment or the VR system.

You'd have to be in close proximity to the camera setup, and if you turned the wrong way you would probably get a view of your own butt. It would be a hell of a project, but damn would it look cool to have a HUD of the sky.

Bonehead82 commented 8 years ago

^ Well, all that or develop a large piece of hardware just for this task.

KevinSerafini commented 8 years ago

Another option... Instead of taking a picture, take a short (5-10 second) video and "sum the frames" to get a single image. It's a way that people turn cheap webcams into astronomical cameras. You could then overlay the sky on top of the result to "annotate" your photo.

The catch is that you'd have to keep the camera still for best results. Still, it might be a cool feature.

On Tue, Sep 27, 2016 at 1:19 AM, Bonehead82 notifications@github.com wrote:

^ Well, all that or develop a large piece of hardware just for this task.

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