Back to Android

I praised iPad Mini as the digital backpacking assistant. It runs Gaia GPS extremely well and serves as a photo backup device (and a photo browser). Performance of Gaia on iOS was the key reason I selected the iOS device to carry with me on remote trips.

But recently I have been facing another dilemma. As I've been getting more and more involved with astrophotography, some of the tools used for this hobby are not available on iOS. Namely this is the PoleMaster.

Deep sky photography is about capturing very faint light. To collect a decent amount of this light, you need to expose for long periods of time. Long enough that you must compensate for the rotation of the Earth. There are tracking heads that rotate in the opposite direction to the Earth's rotation, but the catch is the axis of rotation of the head must be precisely parallel to the axis of Earth's rotation. Meaning you need to align the axis in the field. A procedure to do that involves Polaris (how lucky we are that we have Polaris in the northern hemisphere!) and can be done with a small optical instrument (a polar scope). I could never master this well enough. It was not only me. And to address this problem QHYCCD has come with Polemaster: an electronic camera and software to simplify this process and allow for much more accurate alignment.

Now Polemaster of course requires a software application and this has been available for computers (Windows, MacOS and recently Linux). And for Android tablets. I started using a MacBook Air for this, but it did not make sense to carry this computer just to do polar alignment. My 2nd approach was to install Polemaster app on Raspberry Pi and use iPad as a remote desktop. It did work, although was not comfortable due to the lag. Polemaster requires fairly precise alignment of objects on a graphical window and the lag introduced by remote desktop is making this fine adjustment difficult.

I tried loading the Polemaster app on my Blackberry bu the phone's scree is just too small to do this precise alignment. It'd be ideal to use the iPad Mini. But there is no iOS version of the app.

So I decided to switch back to Android for the backpacking mini tablet. My current choice is Huawei M2 8.4". It comes only with 32GB of storage but the microSD card slot happily accepted a 400GB Sandisk card. That is more than enough to load offline maps and other stuff and still have room for backing up photos (which it does quite nicely using Apple's SD-to-USB-C adapter (vive le standard!). Polemaster seems to be working fine as is Gaia, except for the known setbacks - the Android version of the app is not as nice polished as the iOS one.

One other nice side effect of moving from iPad Mini to an Andoid tablet is the latter works as a phone. With a SIM card you can call people, which may be useful abroad with local SIM (I really have no clue why iPads do not support voice calls over cellular... to sell more iPhones?).

The bottom line her it is not Apple vs Google or iPad vs Samsung Galaxy Tab. It is all about applications. Pick the software first and then hardware that the software requires. Not vice versa.