NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
From: Dave Walden
Date: 2011 Jul 12, 06:10 -0700
After quite some time, I have indeed gotten this astrometry program up and running on a laptop. Quite a fun adventure! If you're interested or would like to try, keep reading.
First I installed xubuntu 11.04 to the hard disk of a laptop along side windows. (I'm no linux guru, but have done a fair amount of running off "Puppy" live CD's.) For this exercise, it seemed pretty clear this needed to be a "real" installation, not a live CD. Then down loaded the source from astrometry.net. I followed the README file instructions to download the dependencies and then compiled all the source code, including the extras. I sent the required request and recieved prompt and polite access the the "quad" data necessary to run the program. I down loaded some (206 thru 219 infact). Took some playing to get this data in the right place. Then after some more playing, I got the examples cases to run correctly.
I then tried our Stonehenge case from George of some time ago. This was of some interest to me, since I had struggled through my star atlas collection for some time to indentify to star field "by hand". The attached "stone" files show the successful result. The wcs files give the fit details (play with word wrap, font size, and width. its the the linux/windows CR/LF issue. Sorry, I didn't get to cleaning it up.) The ngc files superimpose a star atlas image on the field. The indx file shows the image stars in red and the database stars in green. The "prime quad" is the green outline. Pretty impressive since the image included the ground and the stones!
I then tried the ISS image we'd be playing with. Could not get a result with the raw image. I cut off the earth at the bottom and then it did work. Result "116top" files attached. (I think there was just too much contrast. If I knew more about the program and its many settings, I probably could have gotten it to work.)
Not bad for the first night of having it up and running!
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Date: 14 May 2011 18:26
Andres, you asked:
"Do You know, if the solver is not "blind", how many time it takes to calculate an image?"
No. There's no way to tell from the online setup that I mentioned. One can download and install a home version of this. I see Dave W. is going to try to get this going. For me, I just treated it as a blackbox. Of course, we can attempt to determine the properties of a blackbox by feeding it test data. I've tried a few photos in the past couple of years, and you can also look at the thousands of other photos that various users have uploaded. Just sign on to flick.com and visit the astrometry group: https://www.flickr.com/groups/astrometry/
-FER
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