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Visit the Astrometry homepage.
We are building an "astrometry engine" to create correct, standards-based astrometric headers for every useful astronomical image ever taken, past and future, in any state of archival disarray. In the pilot project underway currently, we are working towards the following:
Build an engine that takes any image and a reasonable first guess and returns the astrometry header-ie, a standards-based description of the (usually nonlinear) transformation between image coordinates and sky coordinates-with absolutely no "false positives" (but maybe some "no answers").
Over time, get the system to work with little or no prior information about the telescope pointing, rotation or scale (as is the case for quite a bit of legacy data); install this more general system at plate-scanning projects.
Intellectual merit
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 also facilitates work with distributed, heterogeneous data sets.
We will elucidate and solve 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.
Broader impacts
If there are a few thousand US ground-based observing programs anually with a person-week or so spent on astrometry, an astrometry engine would effectively pay the entire astrophysics community a couple of million US dollars per year in perpetuity.
Our engine will be fully public, with no restrictions on use, for professionals, students, or amateurs. The impact on education will be large, and the barriers to entry on research will be lowered, especially for students and amateurs.
The engine will also be freely mirror-able anywhere by anyone, and we will provide full support for mirroring. We will also provide all of our algorithms and code freely to the public.
By setting the engine loose on historical data, we will enlarge, test, and improve astronomy's burgeoning public data archives, for science and education.
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