The AstroStat Slog

Astrometry.net, a cool website I heard from Harvard Astronomy Professor Doug Finkbeiner’s class (Principles of Astronomical Measurements), does a complex job of matching your images of unknown locations or coordinates to sources in catalogs. By providing your images in various formats, they provide astrometric calibration meta-data and lists of known objects falling inside the field of view.

Astrometry is a branch of astronomy but the algorithms of locating stars and galaxies mainly come from computer scientists whose fundamental ideas are from statistics and mathematics.