Palm PDA in astronomy

The Universe on the Palm of your hand

Have you got a Palm PDA for your bussines? Do you think that this hi-tech Christmas present is not ussefully for you? I could say you a secreet: you have a powefull computer on your hand. And better: you can put The Universe inside it (well, a small copy ;-).

As of today, January 2003, a desktop computer is something like a Pentium 4 at near 2 GHz with more that 128Mb of RAM an near 60Gb of HD and a video card able to excced the 1024x768 pixels at 32bpp. Then, when you look at the specifications of a Palm PDA you see a 16MHz to 32MHz processor (the new Palm Tugsten T is a world apart with a ARM proccessor at 400Mhz) with between 2Mb and 16Mb of total storage capacity (RAM and storage area) and from 160x160 monochromatic to 320x320 at 16bpp color screen. So you think, well, is posible to do anything with this little organizer?. The answer is yes, you can do a lot with this little computer.

One thing that is not obvious directly from the direct comparation between hardware specifications is that a Palm is a lot more powerfull that the computers that controlled some big radio telescopes 20 years ago. Also, the computer inside the Voyager spacecrafts is less capable that this little ones. So, inventive and good use of limited recurses can bring to you very powerfull applications.

A direct advantage of handheld computers, that you can see inmediatly is portability. If you, like me, should travel outside city lights to observe, you will apreciate the below 200g in weigth of a Palm PDA and a size that keeps it inside your shirt pocket. Also, the great autonomy will help you to don't worry about empty batteries (on the slower monochromatics Palm handhelds, the ones without backlight, like the Palm Zire, the autonomy exced a couple of weeks after a full charge. Compare this with the around 2 hours of a 3Kg laptop).

I don't aim to make an extensive catalog of the software available for the Palm related to astronomy, because I think that there are a good one at the Palmastro egroup site. If you are using a Palm with astronomy related software, you should subscribe to this group. At last, the programers of the Three Great astronomy programs for the Palm are subscribed in this list, so posting there your ideas about the killer new option will be listened for the persons that will make it posible.

Planetarium

As Brian Tung say on his FAQ about Astronomy software for the Palm (available on the Palmastro archives), this is one of the Three Great (the other two are PleiadAtlast and 2sky), and this is the one I use and love. Perhaps is not the faster (2sky wins here) and didn't have the deeper star database (PleiadAtlas and 2sky with optional databases wins), but is the one I have choose and use. For me is the most complete of the three.

I don't want to rewrite the Planetarium manual, but I'll show you some of the capabilities of this program, using some screens form Planetarium directly:


Twilight Calculator
When will be dark enough to observe today?
Compass View
Here you can find all the information about position and relation of an object with others (fundamental Sun and Moon). An inovative tool, very handy to determine the best moment to try to locate an objetc. Very usefully for comets!
Sky View
The traditional sky chart view of any planetarium software
Telescope Control
Have you got a mount able to GOTO to an object?. Currently you can interface Planetarium with LX200, ETX, Autostar compatible and NexStar telescopes!.

Info Position
One of the three to four screens with information available after tapping on any object.
Info Statistics
On the bottom of the screen, you can see the current positions of Jupiter's moons.
Info Rise/Set
Is climbing or is declining? Where will be the next best time for observing?
Log Book
Once you have observed an object, you can take notes directly in your Palm, and Planetarium will keep them organized and asociated to the objet for future reference.


Search an Object
Any time you can seach an star or an object. Planetarium will show them on the Sky view and put it on the Compass View if you use it.
Refining by Category
You can define your own categories to help in keep localized your favourite objets, your own datasets or simply the next session ones.

Planetarium Datasets

This is the great adventage of Planerarium over the other two: you can create your own datasets and import them on Planetarium. This lets you define object lists by yourself and prepare your own personal observing session. The imported data are completly integrated with the stock data and all the options are available for them (Rise/Set calculation, Compas View, Log Book, Tap info, etc). As I build new datasets for my own use, I'll publish them here, for all the people using this program.

Spirit of 33 Observing Projects

Since June 1998, Luis Argüelles leads an international group of double stars observers under the flag of Spirit Of 33. Luis has defined a new index to quantify the ability to split a double star, based on the brightnes of each component and the separation. He has named it DI (Difficult Index) and has written some articles available on the web. Every two monts, Luis publishes a new Observing Project to the group with new 33 doubles (and multiple) stars on one (or two) constellations. In the following two months, the members of the Spirit of 33 group, observe this list and publish all the results on the group. Finaly, Luis puts all the observational data on the web, so a nice catalogue of visual observations of double stars is growing day by day.

Some months ago, I began to make star charts for each project using the amazing planetarium program Guide. Since them I have purchased a Palm PDA and Planetarium, I was working on a version of this data to the Palm. Finaly I have compiled the data for all the bimensual projects of Spirit of 33 in a format compatible with Planetarium. Here you can see some screenshots of Planetarium with this data sets.


Sample Chart
Here you can see some pink stars. These are the "Spirit of 33" selected stars.
Searching
When you are using the search dialog, you can see directly the DI of the stars.
Detail
The detailed information about a system includes each member magnitude, separation and PA.

If you whant to give a try to this data set, you can download the current file with all the constellations (on January 2003 the file contains 21 observational projects spaning 23 constellations) and install it on your Palm (obviously you also need Planetarium)

Loading the data in your Palm

If you have a Palm, you know that the "files" aren't stored directly inside the Palm. The only things that you can put inside the Palm RAM are resources (PRC) or databases (PDB). When you need to transfer some textual information (as are these data sets) you need to use some tricks. The most used one is what I call the Memo tunnel, you know, use the internal MemoPad aplication's database to transfer the data between the handheld and the desktop computer.

The databases install of your palm, have some limitations. For example, you can clasify the data inside any database with your own defined categories. The problems is that there are only 14 categories available for you, so if you try to use one categorie for each subset of data available, you run out of them very quickly. A solution will be to use the MemoPad application as a library of datasets and only import in Planetarium the one you can use this night. This is a very quick procedure and can be done completly on the handheld without a desktop PC. I will describe in detail this procedure.

If you have created any object directly inside Planetarium, you should store them in other category (usualy Personal). If you don't keep the two sources of data (imported or directly created by hand) you should delete one by one the objects!. A little of planing in advance will help you on the field!.

pLADIC

This is my first program writen on PalmOS. And when I say ON I don't want to say FOR, but ON the Palm, using only Palm tools as OnBoardC. Following the desing philosohy of the Palm PDA, this is a little program to solve a concrete problem, quickly and focused.

Developed as a Palm companion to the Difficult Index theory by Luis Argüelles. Is a little version of LADIC based on the data from Luis' fuzzy logic model. The usage is simple: you input the magnitude for both components and the distance in arcsec od a double star and pLADIC will compute the DI for that system. No more, no less. But you can compute the DI anyway, anyplace (reading S&T, talking with others about some double, etc) without booting your PC. Thats the principle behind the Palm: Convenience at your hand.

If you are interested in this little piece of software, you can download it. It's free and you can distribute it as you like.

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