That is so cool! Oh hi! Welcome back to the
Reflactor Channel. This is a real game changer. What you're looking at is something called
Astro Hopper and it turns any smartphone into a precision pointing device that works on any
telescope. This is going to revolutionize our hobby. In fact it's already starting to replace quite a
few things such as setting circles, PushTo systems, and maybe even the Celestron Star Sense technology,
but one thing that sets this apart from all those is that this is completely free and it runs on
any type of smartphone. I've been testing Astro Hopper for a few months now and I'm super excited
to share this with you. In this video I'm going to demonstrate how it works and then I'm going to
show you how you can start using it right away. Smartphones are everywhere these days and a lot
of the telescope manufacturers have seen the writing on the wall. If you've used a smart
telescope within the past three decades or so then you've probably seen a hand controller
that looks something like this. This one's the SynScan and it's from Orion. If I open this up
and look at the circuit board it says Celestron. That's quite a coincidence because a few years
ago Celestron released a new technology called Star Sense that combines your smartphone
with one of their new telescopes - it turned your smartphone into a precision pointing device
for your telescope. For new people getting into the hobby this was a game changer and I know
quite a few people that have been in the hobby for a long time that also use this Starsense
technology. Now just as a quick refresher. The Starsense system is comprised of a specialized
platform that holds the smartphone over a mirror which is pointing straight ahead. This allows
the smartphone camera to take pictures of the starry sky right in front of the telescope. The
Starsense app then takes those star images and pairs them to an internal database allowing it
to guide your telescope from target to target. Admittedly it's very clever and the Celestron
engineers really earned their paycheck on that. But there's only one problem. You cannot just buy
the Starsense technology platform by itself and install it on an existing telescope that
you already own. That's because in order to use the Starsense app you need an unlock code
and you can only get an unlock code if you purchase a new Celestron telescope
that features the Starsense technology. That was the problem that a smart young
programmer named Artyom Beilis ran into. He found it nearly impossible to find anything in
his light polluted skies, but he also could not afford to buy an entire Celestron star sense
telescope instead of matching the camera view to an internal image database this is a
method sometimes called plate matching. Instead of doing that he decided to go a much
simpler route and use the sensors that come in every smartphone, namely the GPS, the compass
the Gyros, and of course the accelerometers . Yes! It really is free. What Mr Beilis
did was he took all the output from the sensors on the smartphone and he combined it with a freely
available astronomy database and this produced AstroHopper, which he released as open source. What this means is if you're curious you can look at the source code that goes into Astro Hopper, but
more importantly it means that anybody can use it at no cost. Now to put that into perspective
that means that I do not have to sell even a single copy of my best-selling REDHOPE science
fiction series in order to use Astro Hopper. So here's the big deal that blew my mind
about Astro Hopper. It's not an app and it's not a software package that you have
to install on your smartphone. Instead it's a open source JavaScript web page that you
view with the browser on your smartphone. All it requires is that you have the
requisite sensors that come in most modern smartphones and if you don't have those
sensors, well it's time to donate your smartphone to the Smithsonian. But enough about
how it works, let's demonstrate how to use it. So the first step is to attach your
smartphone to the telescope itself. You can do this easily with just some painters tape. The
advantage of the painters tape is that it will leave very little residue on the tube itself. Another method I've seen used is people will have a secondary case for their
smartphone and then they glue a permanent magnet to the case so that it sticks to the tube itself.
Now of course this assumes that your telescope is made from a ferrous material that the magnet
will stick to. If you'd like a more permanent solution you can download this free 3D printable
smartphone platform from Thingiverse.com It's just been uploaded today so it should be available to
anybody now. This has a couple of advantages, it has all these holes in it and that allows you to
feed a strap through it if you'd like to attach it with a wrap-around straps. It also has hooks
on the end here and if you daisy chain a bunch of rubber bands, you can also feed that around the
body of the telescope to hold it tight. Now this is especially chamfered to fit the tube diameter
of an eight inch Dobsonian telescope, but there's enough of a height difference here that it should
fit on almost any telescope that's at least four and a half to five inches in diameter. One top
tip... when you 3D print this the hooks on the end are closed so you're going to have to use some
wire cutters to pull out that little clip from each of the four corners. I'll put a link to this
3D file down in the description box below. My smartphone is not always so smart. And just in case your
phone runs into the same problem I want to tell you about this. Whenever I attach my smartphone to
a metal tube like this and then I start an app or something like Astro Hopper that uses the internal
compass, it initializes really strangely. It can be off wildly and sometimes I can't get it to zero
out. It's something weird that happens to with this phone only. I'm recording this with an identical
smartphone and that one doesn't have this problem, but never fear... the fix is fairly straightforward.
I start the app or I start Astro Hopper far away about a foot to maybe 18 inches away and then I
just attach it and it's good from that point on. It's not a big problem, I don't know why it does this,
again it's just this particular phone. If you've run into this before please leave a comment down
below. Now with that said, that means that I also don't want the screen to turn off because with
Astra Hopper if the screen turns off while you're using it, that means that the compass may lose its
alignment and then when you restart the screen you may have to go through another alignment
process and with my particular phone sometimes it doesn't really work because of the issue with
this starting on the tube, so I get around that by going into the Android Settings menu... I go into
the Display options and I change the timeout to something larger like two minutes or five minutes
and that usually does the trick. You know when as you're using Astro Hopper and you're
moving your telescope around you'll be touching the screen you'll be having tons of fun and
that should be plenty of time to avoid any kind of screen timeout here. So let's talk about how
you actually get Astro Hopper on your phone now. Again it's not an app it's actually just a website
it's hosted on the GitHub website which is where a lot of Open Source projects are but I found the
easiest way is to just go into your browser search on the word Astro Hopper and it usually comes up
in the top of the search results and I'm going to click on this Astro Hopper web application. This
is the interface that you see. This is sort of a little user manual. You can go through the next
buttons to find out what I'm actually about to tell you all about so let's go ahead and push X
and we'll get right to the screen. Here it is compass locked in so that means if I touch the
screen it's not going to move. If I did want to move it, I have to push this little hand button up
there and then I can move it all around like that, but I'm going to go ahead and put it back on the
compass lock. Awesome ,okay now the field of view that we're seeing is set at 60 degrees if you want
to go up to 90 degrees you push the minus button. There's 90 degrees. It gives you a much wider view
but I actually like the 60 degree option. The Align button, where it says not aligned, we haven't done that yet.
I'm going to save that until the next step when we go outside and actually use it to find something
interesting in the sky. Before we get into the Settings menu let's talk about down here we have
the Azimuth angle and the Altitude angle. Right away this replaces the setting circles if you've
gone to the trouble to add setting circles to all of your telescopes which I have, but now I don't
have to use them because I can use these options right here. This actually right here this tells
you the elevation. I typically will put a digital inclinometer on my telescope, but I don't need to
do that anymore because I have this reading right here, but let's go into the Settings menu there's
not that many because it's fairly simple to use. You can change how the interface looks right here.
If you want everything to be red, you push on Night and everything's red. That's great for Star parties
but for the demonstration I'm going to leave it with the constellations lit up in yellow. Let's
go back into Settings menu. Now you can choose which stars are shown. Right now it's showing
all of them that are magnitude less than or equal to four and deep sky objects it's showing
any that are less than or equal to a magnitude of seven. Now font is relatively self-explanatory.
It actually increases the font on the screen. Tthat's that's a little bit wild right
there that's a little too big. I'm going to take that back down to the typical setting right
there. The list? I haven't really got into the list of items right now. I if you want to find something
like M42 you would type M42 into the search box and it would show a little green line that would
point you to where you want to move and we'll get to that outside. This cluster of items right here?
You can turn these off if you don't want to see star names. You uncheck this if you don't want
to see Galaxy. You uncheck those, in fact you can uncheck all of these and then there's really
not much to see, but anyways I wouldn't know why you'd want to do that. Down here is a great way to
get your GPS settings if you ever need those for anything and this is the sensor output down here.
I believe the C is actually the magnetic compass output So this is essentially the Settings menu
right here. There's really not much to it. It says it's version 1.0.9 and one of the great things about
Astro Hopper is that it's a work in progress and the developer, Mr Beilis is continually upgrading
it and he even takes if you find bugs or have suggestions he'll listen to you. It's a
it's a really neat project. Let's get out of this, so here's the general interface and if
I were to move the telescope you'll see that the image moves. It's really slick and it's a
whole lot of fun actually, so let's go on to the next step. Let's take it outside and give it a
try. All right, so we've dragged the Dobsonian telescope outside we've got our cell phone.
Let's open up a browser and start Astro Hopper All right, there we go, I'm going
to attach it to the platform here. Now the light pollution tonight
is especially bad, and the Moon's out. I can see maybe three or four stars? I
can still see Vega so I'm going to point this at Vega and use it as an alignment
star. I'm going to show you how to align, but I'll use the Red Dot finder first. Now I'll look in the eyepiece. All right,
so Vega is centered in the eyepiece. Now on the screen I'm a little bit zoomed in,
I don't see Vega. That's okay, I'll push this little hand button and that allows me to scroll
this left and right. Scroll to the right a little bit, I'm going to push the Align button now. It says
Select Star, I'm going to click on Vega. It's going to count down here for about three seconds and
now it's all lined up. Now something interesting that we can look at right now is the Hercules
cluster M13. I'm gonna tilt up until we get to that. Okay so now it says that it's pointed at M13. I'm
going to look through the eyepiece and there it is! It's actually not far from the center of the
eyepiece on this one that's pretty darn cool. Now with the light pollution really bad
we're gonna try to find Spica. It's one of the stars that I can see and
the way you do that is you go to the Settings menu and you click on the
search box and let's type in Spica... Push go and it shows a little green
arrow and that's telling me it's pointing to it, and it's telling me
how to move it, so let's try to move it. And there you go it takes us right to it. Now I'm
going to look through the eyepiece and see if I can see it. Okay, it's actually pretty close. It was
on the edge of the eyepiece view and if you look here, it's pretty close. Now according to Mr. Beilis, you do need to do alignments every once in a while, especially
if you cross any large sections of the sky. So let's go ahead and do that. I'll push Align and
Spica is over here, so I click on Spica and it's counting down and suddenly it should
line it up and there you go. So the clouds are starting to move in, so I'm gonna have to
call it quits on this evening's observations, but that's a quick overview of how you use
Astro Hopper in a typical situation. So there you go, that's really all there
is to using Astro Hopper. The interface is pretty darn simple and anybody can use
it as long as you have a smartphone. Now there is one special bonus that I haven't
talked about yet. Astro Hopper can be used even if you don't have any cell phone signal.
If you go to the Settings menu and you click on the question mark it will take you to the
user manual and there's a section called Installing Astro Hopper, so technically you
can make a more permanent installation on your phone and that way it will actually run without
having any cell service. Pretty neat idea huh? Don't let the user interface fool you. Astro
Hopper is a remarkable creation and the fact that Mr. Beilis has given it freely to the world -
Well that reinvigorates my hope for humanity. I mean in that regard it's right up there with
the Crayford Focuser and the Bahtinov Mask, both of which had inventors that similarly wanted to just
share their idea to make the world a better place. So if you haven't done so already, strap
your phone to your telescope and go Astro Hopping - you know, I have a feeling that Astro
Hopping is going to quickly replace the term
