The best of both worlds, a single phone holder for PS Align Pro and SkySafari.
A wet and dreary day in May led me to look back over the requests for phone holder designs (I get a wide variety on an almost weekly basis) and I noticed two that got me thinking. The first was for holder that could easily fit into the Arca Swiss plate of the wedge rather than on the Nomad itself, and the other was for another variation that could be used for PS Align Pro. And that got me thinking, why not one holder that fits the wedge and works for both the SkySafari, Photopills apps as well as PS Align Pro?
To step back for just the moment it is worth remembering that you don’t need to do the polar alignment of your star tracker with the star tracker actually mounted on the wedge. All you actually need to do is align the actual wedge (or pano head, geared head or ball head, it doesn’t really matter) to be parallel with the earths rotational axis and then you can mount the tracker on the wedge and it is by default aligned. Lots of us used to do this before we came up with various brackets to mount the phone on the tracker itself and it is still important for some trackers where the batteries interfere with nearby phones.
The next issue is that the two arguably most popular phone apps for polar aligning; Sky Safari Pro and PS Align Pro; required the phone to be held at two different orientations, right angles to each other. That generally means a different bracket or mounting system depending on which app you choose to use.
About 3 cups a coffee and a few designs later I printed up the very simple bracket above which can be mounted in either orientation and easily mounts to to the MSM wedge you can buy for the Nomad, but will work on any mount that has an Arca Swiss fitting.
The finished braket being used with PS align Pro, the only extra suggestion is perhaps a rubber band to hold the phone in place for the more clumsy out there like me.
A quick test showed I could get 5 minute tracked exposures using either software and a 20mm lens with no trailing. As is my usual practice the file to print the phone holder is available for download here. It is free for everyone to use (but not distribute, check out my earlier blogs or the downloads page for conditions), however if you would like to buy me a cup of coffee at this link I would really appreciate it.
There are some helpful hints in a couple a couple of my YouTube videos (don’t forget to like and subscribe) that apply equally to this holder I would love you to follow me on instagram or Facebook).
Clear Skies
