Here's a window into my research soul: The figure below shows three white iso-failure-rate contour lines (for 90 percent success, 99 percent, and 99.9 percent) as a function of the density of standard stars and the angular scale of our quad index, assuming Poisson statistics, no problems/issues and that we need three quads in an image to declare a match good
. The cyan lines are lines of constant index size (ie, constant RAM usage). The plot shows that we are better going with a higher density of stars and a smaller angular scale. However, what the plot does not show is that if we make arbitrarily small quads, we get less good astrometric solutions (ie, we have to increase the quad–quad match tolerance).
ps. I forgot to mention that this is for SDSS fields.
ReplyDeleteThis week we needed astrometry.net to be working to get the coordinates for a couple of fields one of our students is working :-))
ReplyDeleteWe had a thesis (or a M.Sc. diss) at INPE (Brazilian National Space Research Institute) some years ago the was this kind of work. A guiding system for baloon flights with a CCD camera that takes a shot of the sky and "find itself".
Sorry we weren't up on time for your student!
ReplyDeleteThe balloon problem is the "lost in space" problem and it is generally easier because (a) you have a wide FOV camera, and because (b) you know your camera's technical specs in advance!
Surelly you have all the technical information about the camera, and you also know more or less the region of sky you are looking at.
ReplyDeleteI think that project is very interesting and we'll gonna use it a lot when available!