Magic

[fivemack]

Suppose you have taken a photo with some stars in it, and you can't remember exactly what you were trying to point at at the time. For example, this one



I've had to mangle it a bit in Photoshop to make it more obvious that it's a field full of stars.

If you go to http://nova.astrometry.net and click 'upload' and send them the full-size, unmangled-in-Photoshop version of the picture (available here) then after forty seconds of processing in the cloud you get back

Center (RA, Dec):	(96.103, 34.407)
Center (RA, hms):	06h 24m 24.652s
Center (Dec, dms):	+34° 24' 25.689"
Size:	43.5 x 28.9 deg
Radius:	26.107 deg
Pixel scale:	36.5 arcsec/pixel
Orientation:	Up is 129 degrees E of N

and a version of the image with the stars and constellations marked on it:

Comments

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

I wonder whether you could operate a spacecraft this way? If you're too cheap for a proper star-tracker but you have a camera and an Internet connection, maybe you could e-mail pictures to these guys and get your orientation.

(I'm thinking of a plot point in the pilot to Salvage One, in which the navigation of Elon Musk's Andy Griffith's homebuilt junkyard Moon lander depends on a bootleg connection from Mission Control (Andy's junkyard) to a NASA mainframe. In mid-flight, someone at NASA eventually notices and halts the job, forcing the protagonists to admit their misdeeds and plead with the government for more free computer time.)