Essentially, it is a replacement for digital setting circles without the cables, batteries and external sensors. To date I've only had a couple of chances to take it out, but below are my initial impressions.
Compatibility: IPhone and Android platforms with Safari or Google Chrome (FireFox apparently has some issues in Azimuth). Access to WiFi or data is only needed initially to open the web-
Getting started: To begin, you need to set permissions on your smart phone to allow location and compass access in settings. I didn't realize these are two different settings at first, and the web-
Aim at a known star (Arcturus in this case but it could be a planet or even a
Well, yes simple, but it is a work in progress. It is amazing a single person came up with this and there is much merit for that alone. It is however, not yet as polished as Celestron's Star Sense Explorer software and lacks the nice explanations for each object. On the other hand, the database of objects is reported to be much larger. Furthermore, it is quicker to align as it doesn't have to wait for plate solving to occur, and setting your phone on the
The downside is that picking the initial reference and target stars is tricky on a small phone screen, and if by chance you poke the screen off target, you have to go into settings and refresh the webpage to start over. All this, however, takes mere seconds.
In this example I chose two nearby stars for illustrative images and it worked perfectly. I tried wider swings back and forth between Saturn and Jupiter and it mostly worked with each in the eyepiece as expected, though I found it was best to use the current view as a new reference object to re-calibrate before navigating to the next target with greater precision. Again, done in mere seconds.
Sadly, clouds rolled in before I could try it out on a few
Overall, it does the job of replacing digital circles with an easy learning curve as you figure out the commands. The manual and trouble shooting tips are pretty good (see link below). Not certain of this, but I believe they intend to add new features such as searching for specific objects.
Being an open source web-
From developer Artiom Beilis' Github page:
"SkyHopper is a web application that helps to find objects across the night sky by hopping from a well known and easily identifiable star to other fainter stars or
The smart phone has to have gyro, gravity sensors and preferably compass.
It is a web based application that contains a single HTML page and JavaScript objects database that will continue working even offline as long as it is cached by a browser."
Source: https://github.com/artyom-beilis/skyhopper