Sky Safari on ipad - Telescope Control

[mcwill]

I had an old serial/ip adapter and wireless access point lying around so thought I'd attempt to link Sky Safari running on the ipad to our EQ5 GOTO mount. To say I was impressed would be an understatement, after setting up the above hardware it was a simple case of entering the ip address and port number of Serial1 on the serial/ip adapter into Sky Safari and connection was confirmed.

Unfortunately from this point on it went a bit downhill for me because my 12 year old daughter took control of the ipad and then spent the next 90 minutes picking targets in sky safari to view. She had no trouble sending the telescope to the object although at one point had to fetch a small step from the house to reach the eyepeice on the reflector.

Obviously running the above kit does require the user of an extension cable from the house into the back garden for now but I was interested to try out the telescope control aspect of the software.

The Sky Safari software itself seems very good, with lots of background information about the objects in it's database. The only feature I can't find at the moment is a sort by magnitude option, we have a simple beginner scope so a lot of the objects are beyond our observing limits for now.

Iain

[BlueAstra]

That's interesting. I'll look into it. BTW, do you know how to turn off the annoying sound effects in the programme (I know you can turn the volume off on the ipad, but thats not what I want to do).

[mcwill]

Yes the sound effects were particularly annoying.

They can be switched off under Settings - > Appearance (Don't ask)

Iain