README.md

Widefield Plate Solver

This package provides tools for plate solving wide field astronomical images. Its main difference with using Astrometry.net's solve-field directly is that it can also default to Astrometry.net's API if requested.

Installation

To install the package, run:

$ pip install widefield-plate-solver

Usage

as a script

After installation, you can use the command widefield-plate-solve from the terminal:

$ widefield-plate-solve <fits_file_path> --use_api

Replace <fits_file_path> with the path to your FITS file. Use the --use_api flag to use the Astrometry.net API for plate solving: your environment variables will need to contain your API key.

$ export astrometry_net_api_key="your_nova_astrometry_api_key" 

Not using --use_api will default to your local installation of Astrometry.net, looking for the solve-field command.

For more information on usage, run:

$ widefield-plate-solve --help

from python

See the plate_solve function imported from the package:

from widefield_plate_solver import plate_solve
help(plate_solve)

Dependencies

• scipy
• astropy
• sep
• matplotlib
• astroquery