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Telescopes.pk - Pakistan's astronomy brand
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Telescopes.pk PushTo

Turns a phone into a push-to guide for manual Dobsonian and Newtonian telescopes.

Type
Mobile app
Platforms
Android
Price
Free
Version
1.0.0 (build 7)
Works with
Any manual alt-azimuth telescope - Dobsonians, table-top Newtonians, alt-az refractors. Not for motorised GoTo mounts. Android 7.0 or newer, with an accelerometer and a compass; a gyroscope helps but is not required.
Privacy
No internet permission at all, so the app cannot send anything anywhere. Location is used on the phone itself, to turn celestial coordinates into a direction from where you are standing.

Download

Download for Android (APK) Version 1.0.0-build7 · 51.3 MB · Android 7.0 or later

Adds the live sky view: a drawn map of the sky centred on where the tube is pointing, with 19 constellation figures, search and tap-to-select. If you already have an early copy of PushTo on your phone, uninstall it before installing this one - this build is signed with our own release key, and Android will not replace a differently signed copy. Updates after this install over the top.

SHA-256: 959fc8c845327a6c7b96660c5e1be428ea480581de42690c4086d6850b79df29

On Android your browser may ask you to allow installing apps from this source. Download only from telescopes.pk.

Screenshots

Your phone knows where your telescope is pointing. Pick an object, push the tube until the arrows go quiet, and look through the eyepiece. No motors, no wires, no internet.

Strap the phone to the tube once. After a five-minute alignment, PushTo reads the phone's own sensors, works out where the optical axis is pointing in the real sky, and steers you onto any of 139 objects by hand.

Push-to guidance

The screen tells you which way to swing and how far, and keeps updating as you move. When the tube is inside one degree of the target - about two full Moons across, comfortably inside a 25 mm eyepiece - it locks.

The dial shows raw sensor pointing beside the corrected sky coordinate, so you can always see what the app thinks is happening.

Live sky

A drawn map of the sky as it is right now, centred on where the tube points. Your telescope is the dot at the middle; swing the scope and the sky slides past it. Nineteen constellation figures, the planets, the Moon, the Messier list and the bright named stars. Zoom runs from a 12 degree field to 150 degrees, and the green circle at the centre is your eyepiece's true field of view, drawn to the same scale as the sky.

It uses no camera. A phone clamped to a tube has its lens against the tube, and a city sky gives a phone camera nothing to photograph anyway.

Catalogue

The Sun, the Moon, the planets, the full Messier list and the bright named stars - filtered by what is actually above your horizon tonight, with current altitude and compass bearing on every row. Open one and you get a plain-language description, a difficulty rating for a small scope, and a curve of how high it climbs before dawn.

Tonight

Whether it is worth setting up at all: darkness from the Sun's real altitude, the Moon's phase and illumination, whether it is up and interfering, and the handful of objects worth the trouble right now - all computed for your latitude and longitude, not looked up.

No internet permission at all

PushTo does not request the INTERNET permission, so it cannot send anything anywhere - not your location, not your logbook, not usage data. Every calculation happens on the phone. This matters in practice as well as in principle: a good observing site usually has no signal.

Not the same app as AstroGuide

TelescopesPK AstroGuide drives motorised PSC-GT2 GoTo mounts over WiFi. PushTo is for scopes you move by hand. They are separate apps, they share no code, and both can be installed on the same phone.

Read the Telescopes.pk PushTo user manual — setting up, using it at the telescope, and what to do when it will not point straight.

Join the Astronomy Club (opens paksc.org)