Vixen Style Mount Android Phone Holder

thingiverse

Having done some DSO astrophotography work at night obviously, the next issue I ran into was how to polar align in the daytime. I just did not want to do it at night and leave everything out all night. I saw a few people on the net were strapping there phones to the mount and doing this with an app. I did not care to just rubber band it to a board and clamp it in the mount so I broke out the Solidworks once more and designed up this mount for my Android phone. It has a Vixen mount as part of the design so onto the 3D printer it went. The result came out great with the phone sliding right in nice and snug. This design also guarantees me that the phone is sitting perfectly perpendicular to the mount. Now, after calibrating the phone by moving it around in a horizontal 8 motion I mounted it onto the telescope mount. I have used this on both my EQ6-R Pro and my Skyguider Pro along with the Android App SkEye. I just roughly point the mount to the north and with the app running I search for Polaris. With the Equatorial grid turned on the app’s Telrad pointer arrow points to the direction you have to slew the mount to get to Polaris. You can then zoom really tight with the Telrad and center it perfectly on the EQ grid center point instead of Polaris. Just like looking through a Polar scope at night. Then I set either mount to Solar tracking and slew it to the Sun. Now while this was super easy and really quick to do, I was in doubt of the accuracy of this way of doing it with this App. Well, I left it tracking for 5 hours and when I came back the Sun was still dead center in my camera.