04-27-2023, 07:10 PM
Hello,
I'm absolutely enthousiastic about phyphox and the classroom possibilities it enables! For an astronomy project I would like to help my students to direct their telescopes to the desired direction in the sky. Hence I've put together an experiment that calculates the Right ascension and Declination (coordinates of stars) in the direction the phone is pointing to. It is based on the attitude sensor. However, I need help with two issues:
1) I found documentation about the reference frame and quaternions on android with the result that the experiment is running as expected on most adroid smartphones I have tested. However, many of my students have iphones and it is not giving correct (or even meaningful) coordinates on any of theses phones. I've only found the comment that phyphox adapts the ios coordinates to the android definition. But I haven't found a reference to how this is done in order to systematically test and isolate the problem. Does anybody have experience with this?
2) The calculation of the celestial coordinates is based on time and geographic position. I find it strange, that I can easily retrieve the position from the GPS sensor, but not the time! The user has to enter the time by hand at the time he starts the experiment and then the experiment can calculate the actual time based on that information. I've read several discussions about accessing time from phyphox and lost hope for a simple fix, but if already I post something I thought I could mention this as well...
(it's my first post, I hope I did this in the right way :-) Best regards!
I'm absolutely enthousiastic about phyphox and the classroom possibilities it enables! For an astronomy project I would like to help my students to direct their telescopes to the desired direction in the sky. Hence I've put together an experiment that calculates the Right ascension and Declination (coordinates of stars) in the direction the phone is pointing to. It is based on the attitude sensor. However, I need help with two issues:
1) I found documentation about the reference frame and quaternions on android with the result that the experiment is running as expected on most adroid smartphones I have tested. However, many of my students have iphones and it is not giving correct (or even meaningful) coordinates on any of theses phones. I've only found the comment that phyphox adapts the ios coordinates to the android definition. But I haven't found a reference to how this is done in order to systematically test and isolate the problem. Does anybody have experience with this?
2) The calculation of the celestial coordinates is based on time and geographic position. I find it strange, that I can easily retrieve the position from the GPS sensor, but not the time! The user has to enter the time by hand at the time he starts the experiment and then the experiment can calculate the actual time based on that information. I've read several discussions about accessing time from phyphox and lost hope for a simple fix, but if already I post something I thought I could mention this as well...
(it's my first post, I hope I did this in the right way :-) Best regards!