Through a posting to the Google Earth bulletin board I came
across the project astrometry.net
which provides software (and a web interface to it) to automatically
find the location, orientation and objects located in an
astronomical image. The very interesting description of
how it actually works can be found described in a presentation
available as ppt or pdf document on this page: http://astrometry.net/summary.html
I applied for access to the alpha-status web interface,
and was able to test the projects algorithm using some random
astronomical pictures. It is astonishing how fast the web
service is, if it is able to solve an image, it is done
very quick: |
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first,
astrometry.net tries to find patterns of four stars, for
which a number of indices has been created. Then it tries
to find the other stars and objects in the field.
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For a successfully
solved image, it is possible to download an annotated version,
which describes all the objects found in the image. |
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An unguided image containing a leonid meteor
(above the Ras Elased annotation), The foreground villages
did not prove to be a problem for astrometry.net |
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The same situation as above, an unguided (the
stars have trailed images) shot of Orion rising above the
Bregenzerwald. |
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A shot scanned from a medium format negative.
I have no records of the time I took the photograph, therefore
It would have been difficult for me to determine, what the
actual frame contains. |
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This image was scanned from a technical
pan negative processed for extreme contrast. It even contained
some constellation lines drawn by me, see: http://salzgeber.at/astro/pics/9603242.html
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Comet Holmes with galaxy and open cluster. |
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Again an image with a stationary camera, showing
comet Hale Bopp in the evening sky. |
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A detail of Hale Bopp near Cassiopeia. |
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Part of the constellation Cygnus, showing
the Cirrus nebula |
| cygnus.kmz (1.132KB)
- you have to right-click and choose "save as" to
download the kmz file for Google Earth. |
Using add2sky
I as able to automatically create a Google Earth (Sky) overlay
from the cygnus image, while I was not able to create a kmz
file for some other images I tried. |
