New Algorithms for Automated Astrometry

New Algorithms for Automated Astrometry 2004 In the 'lost-in-space' astronomy problem we are asked to identify the orientation and field-of-view of an image of the sky by matching stars in an image to stars in a catalog. In this work we present two solutions to the problem. In the first approach we reduce an image to coarse positional information represented by a bit-string. We show that by making one assumption about the image we can efficiently solve the orientation problem using bitwise logical operations over an index. In the second approach we search an image for constrained n-star shapes and match them to similar shapes in a pre-computed table. We show that by using constrained shapes we can reduce the time to match n-star shapes to the order of matching arbitrary 4-star shapes.