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A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: Software for Star Recognition
From: Peter Monta
Date: 2014 Jan 24, 12:04 -0800
http://simbad.u-strasbg.fr/simbad/
If you're interested in a more interactive "what is this star?" treatment of the image, I'd second the recommendation to fire up Stellarium and simply click on the star of interest. One can download extra star catalogs down to mag 15 or so, but set the display filter to close to the limiting magnitude of your photo to simplify the visual matching. I think ds9 also offers an interactive catalog-query feature, provided of course you're looking at a FITS file with accurate WCS added.
Cheers,
Peter
From: Peter Monta
Date: 2014 Jan 24, 12:04 -0800
Hi Marcel,
> ... What is the best or easiest way to recognise the stars in this non-annotated red-green-image?
You might want to start with the list of detected sources---the standalone version of astrometry.net provides this as a file. It's simply a list of (x,y) coordinates in pixel space of each star that exceeds the detection threshold. These can then be mapped to global (ra,dec) coordinates using the WCS (world coordinate system) that astrometry.net discovers. Once you have these, I imagine a catalog query can get you catalog names for these sources; try SIMBAD:> ... What is the best or easiest way to recognise the stars in this non-annotated red-green-image?
http://simbad.u-strasbg.fr/simbad/
Peter
