If you are a professional or amateur astronomer and you've ever had an image of the sky whose location or coordinates you did not knowor did not trustthen Astrometry.net is for you. Input an image and we'll give you back precise coordinates (astrometry) for every pixel, plus lists of known objects falling inside the field of view.
Astrometry.net: making the sky searchable "The basic problem we're trying to solve is you give us a picture of the sky we'll tell you where it came from" - Dustin Lang.
Amateur photographers and astronomers will soon be able to navigate the night sky using a computer program developed at the University of Toronto. The computer program is in its testing phase and helps people identify what they're looking at when they look up at a star-filled sky, said the project's supervisor Sam Roweis.
"The idea is that you give an image of the night sky, and it figures out which stars the image contains. There are tons of amateur astronomers taking great pictures, but they rarely record exactly where their telescopes were pointing" - Dustin Lang, one of the lead computer programmers working on the project.
Computer scientists at the University of Toronto (U of T) have teamed up with astronomers at New York University on an ambitious project. You can send them a picture of the sky above your head and their special software will identify the stars that are in the image. In other words, their computer program will make night sky searchable. The team is organising and mixing images coming from astronomical databases with images coming from all kinds of cameras, amateur telescopes, large ground-based telescopes, and space telescopes such as the Hubble Space Telescope. This specialised search engine is still in beta-version, but is available to both professional and amateur astronomers.
Computer science PhD candidate Dustin Lang has embarked on his own Star Trek as part of astronometry.net, a collaboration between computer scientists at U of T and astronomers at New York University. Under the tagline Making the Sky Searchable, Lang and fellow graduate student Keir Mierle have put together a system that takes an image of the night sky and figures out which stars the image contains. The goal of the project, a concept originated by Langs supervisor, Professor Sam Roweis, is to apply cutting-edge machine learning and computer vision ideas to huge astronomical data sets.