[mierle]

Wow, it's cool to see astrometry.net get put to use! I worked on astrometry.net back in undergrad and grad school. If you have questions about how it works, I can answer them.

How does it work? astrometry.net uses 4-star combinations to define codes, then indexes the codes on the celestial sphere. The particulars of each of these phases matter, but that's the basic idea.

[dakr]

I remember my jaw dropping while sitting in a colloquium hearing about astrometry.net from David Hogg back in ...2007?

Fast forwarding a few years, we started using it at SOFIA Observatory to help speed up telescope acquisitions.

[tetris11]

is A,B,C,D in the database the same as D,C,B,A? Or does order infer orientation?

[gmiller123456]

It uses a hash which is scale and orientation independent. A lot of the details are described in this paper:

https://arxiv.org/abs/0910.2233

[moloch-hai]

Order cannot infer anything. Only people, animals, and some programs can infer. Inanimate facts can at most imply.

[antognini]

I used to be in astronomy and I always thought astrometry.net was one of the coolest tools in the field. It feels about as close to magic as you can get.

[malfist]

Astrometry.net is damn handy. I don't use it too much these days for myself except for annotating images, but I do have some friends just getting into astronomy and it's blind solve is amazing to help them.

Plus when I show them plate solving their minds are blown. Hugely useful tool.