Based on complete catalogs (up to 2,5million of stars and 18200 deep sky objects),
Astromist helps beginners in astronomy (as well as the experienced observer) to prepare for and realize their observation sessions.
Astromist provides several sky maps which let the end-user easily find position of the stars,
planets, comets or sky objects (M. Messier catalog, Caldwell, Hershell, SAC, SAO, NGC, IC, Hipparchos, Abell, etc.).
Furthermore, if you want to control your telescope with your PDA, Astromist is just made for you. It controls most of the telescopes available nowadays (meade, celestron, takahasi, losmandy, Astrophysic, ouranos, bbox, ..)
and provides GPS control to automatically locate you on the earth !
Using Astromist sky maps, Two stars alignment has been never made so easy. For more advanced astronomers, Astromist is the only assistant on Palm PDA to provide several stars alignment methods to get
accurate telescope pointing (home dobson with encoder or commercial mount).
At last, Astromist is designed to help astronomer to organize his observation sessions efficiently by answering some usual questions:
Could I see this object tonight ? If not, what will be the best period to observe it?
What will be the obvious galaxies with my telescope tonight?
Could I fully see M31 using my 18mm eyepiece?
I plan to do a one hour observation session tonight. What will be the objects I could see during this time frame ?
Is this object easy to see or not ?
Considering I have this mountain in front of me, What objects will be higher in the sky tonight?
What are the easiest objects to observe tonight ? And the more difficult ?
How can I find this object if my mount is not aligned ?
What object could I see easily, using a Ploss 10mm and my telescope?
Astromist is able to answer quickly to these questions and to more complex one if all the constraints are mixed together:
During the next hour I would like to point my 400mm telescope to see all obvious nebulae which are in the constellation
of the Swan and which will fill my 20mm eyepiece?
"Everything in the palm of your hand" Such was the guiding principle of the design of Astromist.
