Orange Smartie

Just the moon for me last night. The weather looked promising, but clouded over pretty quickly and then with a few spots of rain, I thought it best to pack up. I had a good look at the Montes Alpes, Montes Caucass, Cassini, Mons Piton and the trio of Aristillus, Autolycus and Archimede. Oh, and managed to guess my way to Iota Cancri, which for those who don't know, is a very pretty double star, easily split, and appearing as a nice colour-contrasting pair.

For my birthday, from my sister. Written, I believe by @Ags. It looks amazing and I can't wait to start using it.

I don't have to be up particularly early, but I don't like late nights any more. I tend to do short sessions of around 1 to 1.5 hours in the evening. Obviously this gets trickier as the days get longer, but it's fine at the moment, and I can be packed up well before midnight. Generally speaking, I try to make the most of my observing sessions by planning ahead of time what I'd like to look at; for example, I may focus in on one constellation and cover all the points of interest in that, or if there's no moon, I might prioritise galaxy-hunting. As a purely visual astronomer, I don't find I need huge chunks of time to get a fun experience out of it.

If you don't have it already, I'd recommend a copy of Turn Left at Orion as a good starter guide (with realistic examples of what you can see) to finding your way around the night sky.

There are a good deal of suitable objects out there outside of the obvious ones such as moon and planets. 

Hi. It's 7 pro, I believe.

Thanks all once again for the support and encouragement. Mrs Smartie remarked again what an amazing community this is.

Quick update - old Samsung Galaxy has been revivified after 18 months on the bookshelf and synscan pro and Sky Safari Pro installed. Connected to Sky Safari on the first attempt, so initial indications are that it will work. I can't find a menu option to turn off auto updates, but it does appear that the Galaxy expects me to manually select to download them so hopefully I should be ok with this now. 

Yes, good idea. Turns out, I have an old Samsung galaxy that I can try.

Shame to have to do this, though. The concept is brilliant and when it works, it's very impressive.

Mostly. I have noticed that synscan has frozen a couple of times.

I've tried all combinations of 192.168.4.1 and 192.168.4.2 with 11881 and 11882. Previously, the mount worked with 192.168.4.2/11882 but now it doesn't.

Fixed IP is listed as 192.168.4.1

Communication protocol listed as 11882

Note that the settings which worked before now don't.

I can't connect with either the one you mention above or 192.168.4.2

My az gti is now refusing to connect to sky safari again. Man, this thing is frustrating.

It was first light for my Mak 127 + AZ GTi last night. I spent a while playing with the alignment and just getting used to the whole thing, so not so much an observing session as a mucking about session. However, I enjoyed some very sharp views of the moon, with rupes recta clearly visible. Photographed with my phone - even then it didn't look too bad. I didn't have my 10" dob out for comparison, but I would have said that the image was sharper - could all be in my imagination though.

Then I did a brief tour of some double/multiple stars - 32 eri was a first for me (found by the goto), hj3945 - a favourite double, beta mon, sigma ori, Castor, the trapezium in M42.

Other things I took a look at: M42 - pretty good, but not a patch on a dobsonian view. Eskimo nebula was surprisingly good - a very clear disk. Jupiter - very crisp clear views. Even Mrs Smartie enjoyed this one.

All in all not a bad little session.

Weirdly the port number on some of my presets (in Sky Safari) has changed. If I set back to 11882, it works ok on 192.168.4.2. For the time being...

I'm using a Celestron power tank, 12v as far as I know.

2 minutes ago, Elp said:

That's not how IP addresses and networks work. If you're trying to connect to another device with its own IP address, that is the address you use, you never use the controlling devices IP address as that is uniquely assigned to that device. In synscan pro, the fixed IP address is listed, fixed IP means every time you power the device on, its IP address remains the same and not randomly generated say like if DHCP was enabled like it usually is in your home router when the router wants to connect to the internet (DHCP is not applicable in this usage scenario with Synscan).

Appreciate what you're saying, however the IP address 192.168.4.2, which is the IP address given for my synscan, definitely doesn't work reliably. The address 127.0.0.1 does seem to work. 

It's just disconnected. I expect that's due to the phone going to sleep as I've been on my laptop for the last few minutes. Otherwise things seem to working fairly stably (with the odd caveat that I can't connect to the IP address I was originally using, as I described above).

Update: using the method that AstroNebulee suggested above, in developer options I set "suspend execution for cached apps" to "disabled" and the mount has been running without issue for several minutes, in spite of Sky Safari being "in front". So thank you once again Lee, for your patience and help, it is very much appreciated!

Just need some clear skies now......

Thanks for that. I'm in the process of trying it as I type, so I will feedback on what happens. Interestingly, when I switched the mount on this afternoon, I found that the normal settings for Sky Safari connection don't work (that is 192.168.4.2). Weirdly, I tried connecting with 127.0.0.1 and that did work. Where does that IP address even come from?

10 hours ago, AstroNebulee said:

I had a mooch about and seems it's a common issue that pixels and phones running Android 12 and above kill apps running in the background. 

I did see this if it helps? 

Under Developer Options under "Standby apps" you can manually set the app as "ACTIVE."

 

 

Thank you for this. SynScan Pro is listed in Standby apps as EXEMPTED from app standby state. Edited to say that it's greyed out and I can't change it directly.

42 minutes ago, AstroNebulee said:

Hi

What device are you using? Is there a way of keeping the synscan app running in the background? 

Lee 

It's a Pixel 6a. I haven't been able to find a way of ensuring it's running in the background.

I think my version of synscan pro is up to date - it should be, I only installed it yesterday.

I haven't tried that specifically and I'm not sure exactly how I would do that. I believe I'm staying connected to the WiFi but it's difficult to test it. Syn Scan doesn't appear to drop off the WiFi as when I go back to the Syn Scan app, I don't need to reconnect to it. The issue really seems to be with what happens to Syn Scan when I'm sitting in Sky Safari. As I type, I'm running a test where I find something in Sky Safari but then have the Syn Scan app open in front of me; it's been running for a few minutes so far and as yet hasn't dropped out. I can hear the mount gently clicking as it tracks the position.

So it looks like a bodgy fix would be:

Open Syn Scan and connect. Align. Open Sky Safari and GoTo selected astronomical object. Keep SynScan in front to maintain active WiFi connection.

Not particularly satisfying but already a whole lot better than where I was yesterday evening.

Hi all. Further testing with Sky Safari Pro shows that control of the mount is possible, but only for a few minutes. The telescope then disconnects and when I try to reconnect via Sky Safari, I see the message "skysafari pro can make a wireless connection to the scope, but the scope is not responding. make sure the scope is powered on and connected correctly. Also make sure you selected the correct scope type."

If I then go back to SynScan and find an object (e.g. Jupiter), when I go back to Sky Safari, lo and behold - the scope is connected and pointed at Jupiter. But the connection is really unstable and it's not very usable this way.

As @AstroNebulee says, I'm sure this is indeed an issue with the way apps are handled in the background. As I typed this, for example, the telescope disconnected again and I got the warning on Sky Safari. Revisiting Syn Scan and clicking on Alt-Az mode reestablished the connection so when I went back to Sky Safari I could control the scope through that.

So it kind of works, but not very satisfactorily. Unfortunately, I don't have exactly the same options for controlling battery usage as AstroNebulae showed in their response - I have a simple choice of "unrestricted", "optimised" and "restricted". Unrestricted doesn't stop the telescope disconnecting.

It's possible that mine might do that now that the battery options have been changed, but I haven't tried it that way yet.

Does anyone know what happens if more than one Az GTi is within range of your phone? How does one select the correct connection, or is it just not possible to have multiple mounts running close to one another?