WWT 2022 Release Notes: Aligner
WWT 2022 marks the first release of the WWT Aligner app, which is intended to help assign correct astrometric information to press-release imagery.
In particular, the aligner addresses a fairly specific problem. Say that you have an astronomical image in an RGB format (e.g., TIFF or JPEG). If it’s missing astrometric referencing information and you want to change that, the amazing Astrometry.Net service can often figure out the positioning just from the stars in your image, without any external help at all. But in some situations, such as when an image has a very small field of view, Astrometry.Net might fail.
In these cases, the WWT Aligner might be of assistance. If you can provide it with both your image and one or more FITS files from which the image data originated, it will try to align the two and transfer coordinate information from the FITS data. Under the hood, this is actually done using the Astrometry.Net software — the Aligner generates custom “indexes” from the FITS data that can be fed into its solver algorithm.
Installation
For guidance on installing the WWT Aligner and getting started using it, see the Image Creators page.
For more information, see the WWT Aligner documentation. See the detailed WWT 2022 components list for links to developer resources such as code repositories and changelogs.