(I write in English for convenience)
- OpenBabel.Erdély, a Romanian-Hungarian Dictionary, useful for Hungarians living in Romania. It incorporates general usage words, institution names and expressions specific to public life, locality names and toponyms in general. I recommend the web gui csillagtura.ro/obe. Details on this page. OBE is also available as integrated into an editor, the obe-wordpad.I consider maintaining this dictionary a duty towards my community.
- DSO browser – has a database of more than 200k deep sky objects, able to show their realtime apparent position on the sky from the location of the observer, and estimates imageability based on altitude, overall brightness, surface brightness, distance from the Sun and from the Moon etc. csillagtura.ro/dso uses the obe frontend, so it can be invoked from it using the :dso search argument, like NGC 7000 :dso, but the night mode /dso is the interface I recommend. I use the DSO integrated into csillagtura’s wordpress to aid me with writing articles. It also has an object marking utility, which I will expose later.
- Aladin to Photo Planner – it builds on the Aladin Lite API and visualization and on DSO to help plan astrophotos, including mosaics.
- Polaris – for polar alignment
In amateur astronomy a short but very important task is to correctly polar align the telescope’s mount. My Polaris “app” is a visual aid to do just that. - Planetary video length estimator — based on the allowed motion blur, it calculates to maximum length a planetary video should be for a given object: the Sun, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, though Mars and Venus are the two most relevant, by far. Accessible here.
- StarHeal – in astrophotography
A program to handle dense star fields on astrophotographs, sometimes I call it starheal but doesn’t really have a name. - the putzolo
A userscript to tweek facebook’s interface. - my personal web browser: around a WebView, I built the subset of a web browser I need for a less annoying experience on my phone: it has both java-level and javascript-level adblocking built in, and gets rid, at least on the pages I visit, of the annoying gdpr and other popups.
- the Soapbox project – guiding my telescope
I put together a little piece of hardware, based on an Arduino, to give commands to the mount, through the ST4 port it exposes – even if no such port is exposed, like in the case of my old EQ3 mount. The whole device resides in a soapbox, hence the name. It receives commands from the desktop, which runs another piece of the puzzle, an app that tracks stuff on the live view displayed in the recording software. As an extra, the soapbox also drives the motorized focuser, be that through buttons, a joystick or an encoder, of which the last one is my favorite so far. The encoder itself has its own Arduino, can be used as a standalone device, or as an extension to the Soapbox, hooked up in a daisy chain, to receive serial commands from the PC. - the filterwheel automation — related to the soapbox project above, I motorized an otherwise manual filter wheel.
- OBS keyboard: a hardware keyboard, a USB HID keyboard in fact, emitting complex key combinations to be interpreted by OBS, Open Broadcasting Software. Useful for streaming and recording videos.
- EQ3-controller. Also astronomy, related to the mount: I reverse engineered and reimplemented the hand controller and motor drive of the dual axis EQ3 kit. The new hand controller uses the old motors, mechanically nothing changed that affected compatibility. The new device exposes a standard ST4 port, thus integrates well into my existing setup. It also has a display, beeps as a dead man’s switch feature when left idle, and offers wider speed ranges. I programmed into it some backlash compensation, for the EQ3 mount has quite some, expecially on the DEC axis.
See my github — though I don’t really update it.
