standards!

Arrgh! I spent a significant fraction of today dealing with a problem caused by the fact that few consider standards—agreed-upon conventions for formatting data, for example—important. In this case, some of Willman's images, taken at some typical observatory, had astrometric information that conformed to no existing WCS standard or even convention! If you aren't going to obey the standards, then at least obey the conventions. One of the big goals of astrometry.net is to get all image WCS onto one of the standard formats, but that means that astrometry.net is going to have to know quite a few of the non-standard, idiosyncratic ways people have chosen—independently—to put the WCS into an image. Until astrometry.net standardizes everything, there will be no grid or interoperability among heterogeneous data sets.