auromat.solving package

Module contents

This package allows to georeference images using the camera position and the starfield within the image. It should be generic enough to work with any kind of images but was developed with ISS aurora images in mind. It tries to automatically detect where the starfield in the image is (see auromat.solving.masking modules) and then runs astrometry.net to extract the stars and find the pointing and scale of the image (see auromat.solving.solving module).

For images taken from spacecrafts (like the ISS) it contains two convenience modules: spacecraft and eol. The spacecraft module determines the spacecraft position (=camera position) at the time the image was taken using TLE data from space-track.org, given the NORAD ID of the spacecraft. The eol module allows to easily download images from NASA’s Earth Observation website in JPEG and RAW format.

The resulting calibration is a FITS WCS header from which the geodetic pixel coordinates can be calculated from. The counterpart modules in the mapping package are auromat.mapping.astrometry and auromat.mapping.spacecraft. The auromat.mapping.iss module relies on those two modules as well and is tailored towards the ESA ISS archive containing such images and calibrations.