[Kstars-devel] A far fetched idea - Image alignment

[Akarsh Simha]

Hi

There's this excellent project called Astrometry.net which is licensed
under GPL. Give it a photograph of any region of the sky - no data to
be input (not even center RA/Dec) and it solves the field and
identifies all stars and objects in the field of the photograph. I've
tried the website in the past and it it doesn't fail easily.

When I was talking to a friend about image alignment in KStars, he
recommended making field solving a permanent solution incorporated
within KStars, so that the user could download images on the fly and
incorporate them (not only in the details dialog, but also) as inline
thumbnail images.

It might be a far-fetched and unnecessary thing to go about
implementing, but I was thinking of something that uses the astrometry
libraries to automatically re-orient images correctly in KStars! This
might eventually help us do texture mapping.

Any thoughts on this?

Regards
Akarsh