For the last couple of months I have been playing around with an idea. First my idea was to combine Sextractor and Astrometry.net to avoid using python. That worked very well and so I build it in as an option in KStars. Not only did it work without python, it was often faster than traditional astrometry solving. But there are many parameters. So I started trying to explore and play around with the parameters and found it easier to do in a separate testing program instead of in KStars so that I could really focus on the problem. Then after I got it up and running, I got a little bolder. I thought it might be a cool idea if we could make astrometry.net into a library and get it natively running inside an Internal Library in KStars on Windows Mac and Linux, instead of an external set of programs that only works on certain operating systems all kludged together. So over the last couple of months, I have done exactly that. I don't believe it is done yet, but I think we are ready for some rigorous testing to start evaluating how well it works, try to make it better, figure out what parameters are effective and which ones are useless, and see what parameters should be added. Right now, for some images, the SexySolver is faster than any of the other methods, but for others it is not. It should by definition be faster because it doesn't have to save any temporary files along the way, nor does it need to call any external programs. So I think if we can fix this up, it should be much more efficient.
Here is my project:
github.com/rlancaste/sexysolver-tester
To try this out, you don't need any programming knowledge, you just need some astronomy photos, a computer on which astrometry.net index files have been downloaded, and if you want to compare to external astrometry.net, sextractor, astrometry.net, or ANSVR, they would need to be installed, but that is optional. You just need to download the solver tester program and start trying it out.
Here is the download link to the Windows and Mac installers for the latest release version:
github.com/rlancaste/sexysolver-tester/releases/tag/0.8
What kind of feedback do I need? Well several things:
- Which parameters seem to help solve images faster and more accurately?
- For sextracting, which parameters really seem to help make the source extraction better?
- Which parameters don't seem to help too much?
- Which parameters should not be exposed to the users because they could mess up the solve?
- What additional parameters would we need to add?
For any programmers out there:
- If you can take a look at my code and help optimize it in any ways that would help
- Any Sextractor, SEP, or astrometry.net experts could look at my SexySolver code to see if it is accurate or can be improved
- I had to make a bunch of changes to astrometry to get it to work on Windows. It mostly works now on windows, but if there is any way to make my changes better, that would help.
Once we get this refined, it should be able to greatly enhance Plate Solving, Guiding, and Focusing algorithms and could be used to support other cross platform QT based programs that could run on Astrometry.
Thanks for your help,
Rob