Hi Bill,

It seems to me your program MoonView might be modified for use as a
"poor man's" blink comparator to match stellar fields photographed at
different dates. It should also be useful in the present case to
match DSS .fits files to various star charts. Does this sound
feasible? It seems a shame MoonView isn't more easily found on the
Project Pluto website. I'll bet others could come up with some ideas for it.

Larry

At 08:57 AM 6/19/2010, you wrote:

>
>
>Hi Bob,
>
><mailto:robertjmodic%40att.net>robertjmodic@... wrote:
> > I have about 300 images from the various sky surveys that
> > I've downloaded as .fits files from:
> >
> >
> <http://archive.stsci.edu/cgi-bin/dss_plate_finder>http://archive.stsci.edu/cgi-bin/dss_plate_finder
> >
> > Most of these display just fine in Guide 8. A small number of them,
> > however, are skewed or rotated about the center slightly so that
> > cataloged stars do not register with those in the images. I've
> > examined the headers, but there are so many parameters, I'm not
> > sure what to look for.
>
>Yup, DSS FITS headers tend to have about a bazillion odd parameters.
>And many DSS images are _supposed_ to be somewhat tilted, either because
>the plate was taken that way or because you're near the edge of the
>plate; those plates are six degrees on a side, and there are
>significant projection effects over that sort of field.
>
>Are the plates mostly in a particular area (say, near the poles)?
>
>The position and orientation of a FITS image can be stored in at
>least three ways (two "standard", one DSS-specific). Guide looks for
>all of them. Maybe these files are implementing a fourth method.
>Or a slightly "off" version of the other three.
>
>Can you give me an RA/dec and the survey from which the image was
>taken? I gather this happens with 'a small number of them', so I
>presumably wouldn't stumble upon them at random.
>
>-- Bill
>

Laren Dart
http://ldart.got.net


[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]