Astrometry.net have built an “astrometry engine” to create correct, standards-compliant astrometric meta data for every useful astronomical image ever taken, past and future, in any state of archival disarray. The astrometry engine takes any image and return the astrometry world coordinate system (WCS)—ie, a standards-based description of the (usually nonlinear) transformation between image coordinates and sky coordinates—with absolutely no “false positives” (but maybe some “no answers”). It will do its best, even when the input image has no—or totally incorrect—meta-data. The engine is installed for real-time operation on the web, at observatories, at plate-scanning projects, and at data archives.
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