Using To Plate SolveĪ is a free plate solving service. Learn more about the things you observe in the sky with my free book, Introduction To The Cosmos. The next part of this tutorial explains how to plate solve your images. Your images with the astrometric solution about where they’re from is a best In astronomy, it all boils down to your images, so enriching Plate solving writes the coordinates of the center of your image to the FITS header so that you can use planetarium software, Aladin, or a variety of other applications to analyze your images and figure out what is interesting about your images. I also show you how to use the resulting image in AstroImageJ and refer you to another tutorial where I show you how to use Aladin to investigate your image. This tutorial walks you through using the free plate solver service,. I discussed AstroImageJ in my book and discussed plate solving there too. Other applications like MaxIM DL, Aladin, and many others can take advantage of the information in a plate solved image. This information can be useful for locating things in your images that might be very small or might be very faint. When you open an image that has been plate solved in software like AstroImageJ, JS9, or JS9-4L, it will display the celestial coordinates of your pointer. The information about the plate solve is written to the FITS header of the plate solved image and is available for use by other applications. Along with the position of the stars in your image, the plate solve also provides details about the location of the center of your image in the sky, the image scale, and orientation. Plate solving your images is a process where you find a match between the stars on your own image and an astronomical catalog.

Plate solving software