Mierle

Keir Mierle (Toronto) just showed up for two months of hard work on astrometry.net. We spent a long time going through the gory details of tweak, which is the process by which we take a pretty-good astrometric WCS solution for an image and make it precise (and, we hope, accurate) and encode it in the image header in a standards-compliant way. None of this is very difficult; all of the difficulty comes in dealing with the heterogeneity of input images and desired output WCS formats.

Mierle's main project, if we can stabilize tweak quickly, will be to work on the general blind camera calibration problem, in which a large number of images from a single camera are used to figure out the optical properties, and variations of those properties with focus, temperature, gravitational loading, etc., just by looking at the images themselves. This is the problem astronomers working on deep imaging call astrometry, and frankly we are not competitive if we can't do this very well.