[Note, this is an old file; current Astrometry.net document (such as it is) is
mostly on the Wiki at trac.astrometry.net]


Research Code Snapshot (April 2007) for Astrometry.net
=========================================================
Copyright 2006, 2007 David W. Hogg, Dustin Lang, Keir Mierle and Sam Roweis.

This code is meant as an accompanyment for an upcoming paper and its main
purpose is to allow reproduction of the results in that paper.

This is research code only and is not intended for scientific use in reducing
data or other analyses.

This release includes a snapshot of all of the components of our current
research code, including routines to:
  * Convert raw USNO and Tycho2 into FITS format for easier use
  * Uniformize, deduplicate, and cut the FITSified catalogs
  * A simple but powerful HEALPIX implementation
  * QFITS library with several modifications
  * libkd, a compact and high-performance kdtree library
  * Build the files and data structures our system requires
    (indexes) to build a blind astrometry solver.

In principle, the code in the tarball is sufficient to reproduce our entire
astrometry system and replicate our blind astrometry results (e.g. on the SDSS
fields). However, this requires the entire USNO-B 1.0 catalogue which is about
80GB in size. Therefore, as a proof of concept, we have released an
intermediate file representing the processed catalog data from 1/12th of the
sky (including converting USNO to fits, uniformizing, cutting by magnitude and
building a star kd-tree datastructure). 

Using this intermediate file, it is possible to build the remainder of the
index files necessary to blindly solve the astrometry for SDSS-like fields that
are contained within that particular 1/12th of the sky. We have included some
example SDSS fields in this region which can be used to verify that the system
has been installed correctly.

Quick start instructions:
1) Go to a directory with 3GB free.
2) Download and run the file http://astrometry.net/???/getcode.sh
   (it will take about 20mins on a modern workstation).

Solving new fields???
- What exactly do you need to do to solve a sloan field?
- What is in out?
- About printsolved to see what actually got solved
- input format the file needs to come in
  - single field per file, one star per line
  - each line is x y, as read by fscanf("%lf %lf\n")
- printmatch

LICENSE
------
The Astrometry.net suite is free software licensed under the GNU GPL,
version 2.  See the file LICENSE for the full terms of the GNU GPL.

CONTACT
-------
Please send inquires/bug reports to code@astrometry.net
