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astrometry.net image calibration

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  • 18-01-2013 3:12am
    #1
    ps200306
    Registered Users Posts: 1,591 ✭✭✭


    Is this the coolest sh1t ever! ...

    http://astrometry.net/

    "If you have astronomical imaging of the sky with celestial coordinates you do not know—or do not trust—then Astrometry.net is for you. Input an image and we'll give you back astrometric calibration meta-data, plus lists of known objects falling inside the field of view.
    We have built this astrometric calibration service to create correct, standards-compliant astrometric meta-data for every useful astronomical image ever taken, past and future, in any state of archival disarray. We hope this will help organize, annotate and make searchable all the world's astronomical information...

    The removal of astrometry as a barrier to using legacy and badly archived (or not archived) data will greatly extend astronomical time baselines into the past, and greatly increase time sampling for sources all over the sky. It facilitates work with distributed, heterogeneous data sets. It also provides a channel for professional and amateur astronomers to collaborate, as the installation of correct WCS makes currently hard-to-access amateur imaging data interoperable with professional projects.

    We have elucidated and solved a fundamental computer science problem in the field of geometric hashing: the fast and efficient search for matches to patches of a two-dimensional set of points, when the patch to be matched has unknown location, scale, orientation, and completeness or contamination, as well as realistic errors. Efficient and robust algorithms for this matching problem will be the basis for attacking many highly non-trivial problems in pattern matching, data analysis, and computer vision."

    As an example, they grabbed images of a particular comet from all over the web, calibrated them using their engine, and computed an accurate orbit for the comet. The possibilities are endless ... I'm thinking it could form the basis of a distributed supernova search program.

    See a presentation on how they developed the algorithms and built their index:

    http://cosmo.nyu.edu/hogg/research/2006/09/28/astrometry_google.pdf


    h/t ZeRoY and TzeTze for the pointer to astrotortilla
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