Astronomy and the Sony PSP

[Sci Fi Guy]

Hi guys.

I'm new here but I'm getting some kit next month and thought I'd share this with you.

I love my Sony PSP, and once you put some custom firmware on it (if you want to know how to put homebrew on your PSP drop me a line) I'm convinced it can do pretty much anything! I've found some pretty cool astronomy stuff today while researching what gear to get and thought some of you could make some use of it!

Cosmology for your PSP: http://astro.uchicago.edu/cosmus/projects/psp/

The university of Chicago are working on a project to bring a host of scientific content to the PSP. It's still early days, but at the moment they have some photo essays from the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics, an animation of mapping the universe and a panarama from the MER rover and one of the multiwavelength Milky Way.

Star Charts for PSP: http://www.flickr.com/photos/bernardroth/sets/270557/

Some guy called Bernard Roth has formatted some star charts from the Mag 7 Star Atlas Project to fit the PSP's awesome screen.

PSP GPS: http://pspupdates.qj.net/tags/planetarium/6938

A full GPS system for your PSP. The combination of all these apps together would make for quite an arsenal! Also on this page is...

"Homestar Portable": http://uk.psp.ign.com/articles/721/721307p1.html

Good screenshots: http://kotaku.com/gaming/sega/homestar-psp-yeah-its-full-of-stars-190756.php

Demo available from: http://www.psp-vault.com/UpDownload-req-viewdownload-cid-14.psp

This is a Japanese planetarium program from Sega which seems to be getting some interesting press and thousands of demo downloads. The images look very impressive, and the features seem spot on, but I think it's all in Japanese, with no scheduled European or US release yet.

PSP Astronomy: http://www.psp-vault.com/UpDownload-req-viewdownloaddetails-lid-2114.psp (scroll to very bottom)

This is a astronomical program to calculate the sun and moon eclipses, position of the planets, position of the moons of jupiter and even plot a starchart for your local position. I had a quick go with this today but to be honest the numbers mean nothing to me, but I reckon it could point you to various objects based on your local position at a set date and time.

Hope this strikes a chord with some of you!

[strutsinaction]

Thanks for the heads up on this! My son has a PSP Slim so I'll dump the star charts on there and see how usable they are at night. I assume he'll need the custom firwre for the applications though so I'll need to do a little more research before trying those.

Stellarium for the PSP - now that would be cool ;-)

[proflight2000]

sci-fi. how do you get the charts onto the psp, i know how to add things just not sure how you get them from images on a pc to the psp cheers

[iancandler]

sci-fi. how do you get the charts onto the psp, i know how to add things just not sure how you get them from images on a pc to the psp cheers

You just drag and drop the star charts as images into the pictures/photo's folder.

I would love to see homestar developed for the Uk, also given that the PSP has a usb socket the possibilities are endless for astro use, it could even be used to control your scope, maybe someone will work up a version of Tachyon (PDA software) for the PSP.

[cygnusx1]

it could even be used to control your scope,

already done on the Wii