Here is last night's catch, asteroid 16 Psyche.
This is interesting for many reasons. It is relatively large, about 220Km in diameter and of type M, with a very high metallic content, which is quite rare. There is a probe with the same name heading towards it, expected to arrive in 2029.
It orbits the sun every 5 years, with a mean orbit radius of 3AU, between Mars and Jupiter. And it is as close to Earth as it will ever be right now, 1.7AU with a current magnitude of 10, quite easy to see with the S50 if you know where to look.
Now for the less nicer part. Finding this in SkyAtlas and pointing the S50 to it is hard, really hard. SeeStar knows about it and if you zoom in into the right area of the sky (it's in Capricornus by the way, closest major star Theta Capricorni) you will see it in Sky Atlas. But you cannot search for it, there are thousands of targets, mostly minor stars, asteroids and small galaxies that SkyAtlas will display, but cannot search for. And even if you manage to find it in SkyAtlas, it's not really there, if you try to take a picture you will miss it completely by a couple of degrees or so, because the program shows you where it was about two days ago, not where it is right now.
One final gripe, which I have never seen mentioned here that I find highly annoying, is the SkyAtlas pinch-zoom function, which is complemented by the addition of two useless + and - buttons in version 2.0.0. You cannot zoom beyond the point where the red target rectangle almost fills the screen. Well, you can, and as you do more information starts appearing on the display, like star names, small galaxies and such, but as soon as you let go, the view immediately snaps back to the standard 1:1 zoom. Also, while you are in this extra zoom mode, the image does not sit still, instead it constantly pans in a random direction, so you cannot even have a good look at the image. In fact, when you use two fingers to pinch zoom, both in and out, the image constantly moves on its own and you cannot pan at all - I consider this a bug that needs to be fixed.
Other minor requests. SkyAtlas constantly displays an Alt/Az grid, in a dark brown color that is extremely hard to read, I have to use a magnifying glass to be able to see the coordinates of those lines. And I still think SkyAtlas should constantly display the Alt/Az and RA/Dec coordinates of the red cross in the center of the target red rectangle at the top or bottom of the screen at all times. You should also be able to display both Alt/Az and RA/Dec grids in different visible colours and turn them on or off independently like Stellarium does. You should be able to pinch zoom with two fingers or use the new + button beyond the 1:1 level and stay there, without the annoying constant pan. As you start zooming out, smaller star names (of the HD nnnnnn) type) immediately disappear, well before the names of asteroids and brighter stars do so, this, as well as the complete absence of RA/Dec information about where you are makes orienting and searching for things much harder than it needs to be. And of course, if you have the information about a target to display it on the screen, make it available in the search function too.
