Downloaded 1.4 yesterday and tried it out last night. The Goto now works on both my phone and tablet (the UI is easier to operate on the smaller phone screen). I'm just nitpicking here but I wish the built-in star catalogs would be bigger as I couldn't find quite a few well known double stars. For example I was observing the doubles in Cassiopeia the only one I could find in the app was Eta Cas, the others such as Iota Cas and HD11092 weren't there. The new Polar Finder seems to work well. I didn't check the telescope position in the Sky Map due to its vivid colour and brightness which could destroy my dark adaptation.

While this new app now worked like a charm, I had a bit of trouble with plate solving in Ekos. I don't think Kstars/Ekos has been updated recently, but for some reason when I attempted plate solve to centre my targets, the solver would get the solution and telescope coordinates correct, then calculate the dRA and dDEC wrong sometimes. This would slew the mount to some completely incorrect place in the sky. I don't know if any of you guys have encountered something similar on the latest Astroberry.

Fantastic!You're right, I constrained the stars catalog quite a bit to speed up the catalog loading. I'm optimizing the process to allow for more stars in the next version.The new ultra-dark mode in v1.4 fixes that. Just press the eye icon on the toolbar to make the app and the Sky Map red and dim.
As far as the plate solving is concerned, I didn't experience pointing issues last time. Unfortunately, Astroberry's INDI and KStars versions are not up-to-date. See this GitHub issue .

Man, you're a star! Looking forward to your next version with a bigger star catalog.

I did notice the new dark mode, but I thought it only applied to the UI. Guess I should have checked the sky map if it's now also displayed in dark/red mode.

I didn't realise Astroberry INDI repo hadn't been updated to 1.8.8. Maybe I should get Ubuntu and install Kstars/Ekos, INDI and astrometry.net from their official repos directly.

Done, I just added stars up to mag 7 to the app and release v1.4.1. There should be enough now. You can also lower the number of stars in the catalog from the settings.
Also, as @Ihoujin requested, I implemented the visibility filter and added altitude and azimuth to the objects' details.

Marco,

This thread just saved me a lot of time and frustration. I was literally hunting down the KStars Lite source code so I could see what I could do to make it useable, when I stumbled upon your new app, which I'm sure is way better than I would have come up with. Question, though. You guys mention plate solving, and I can't find anywhere in the app to do that. Am I just blind and missing it, or is it not supported yet?

Thanks,
Karl

Hi @Karlrees,
Happy to know that you like my app! Let me know if you have any suggestions or if you find bugs. Unfortunately, KStars Lite is pretty much dead at this point. I had better luck writing a new app from scratch, and it runs so much faster because it uses Android native code (it's not a port of a full-fat desktop planetarium). At this stage it is under active development and has a paid Pro version to support the project, because - being new - it's rather unknown in the community.
We were talking about Ekos' plate solver, Telescope.Touch doesn't have one. It probably never will, because Astrometry doesn't run on smartphones. Perhaps someday I'll find a hacky way to do it.
Kind regards,
Marco Cipriani

Here's a thought. If a mobile internet connection is available, implement online plate solving with astrometry.net.

That's a good idea, I'll see what I can do. I've also found out there's an Astrometry.net INDI driver, but I have never used it.

Online plate solving has too many restrictions. This app requires an INDI server to operate. Why not just run plate solving remotely on the INDI server?

The new Pro version looks very promising and is shaping up to be a nice mobile imaging app.

I can see that you've been using the VizieR catalogue service for the built-in object catalogue. Is it possible to update it with more stars? The current one is fine for DSOs, but is quite lacking for stars especially double stars which is a major area of interest in visual. For example the well known double/multiple stars Algebra (gamma leo), eta Cassiopeiae, etc. cannot be found in the current goto database.

Thank you @knight_parn!

At the moment I'm using VizieR Common Stars catalogue, which is pretty limited. I'll see in the next release if I can switch to a different one or add a specific double-stars catalogue.