I’m not a professional by any means and am pretty new to astrophotography. Looking at the Stardroid repo there, it looks like it’s using GPS+Compass+IMU for pointing. That’s awesome for coarse positioning, but Plate Solving (what AstroHelm is doing) is using the photos themselves to do fine positioning. https://nova.astrometry.net/ is an open service that can take images and tell you where in the sky you were pointing. https://nighttime-imaging.eu/docs/master/site/advanced/plate... has some more details about different techniques and software packages. My understanding is that is basically identifies the 4-8 most prominent stars in the image and the angles between them and does a nearest neighbour search in a massive database. Pretty cool!
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I’m not a professional by any means and am pretty new to astrophotography. Looking at the Stardroid repo there, it looks like it’s using GPS+Compass+IMU for pointing. That’s awesome for coarse positioning, but Plate Solving (what AstroHelm is doing) is using the photos themselves to do fine positioning. https://nova.astrometry.net/ is an open service that can take images and tell you where in the sky you were pointing. https://nighttime-imaging.eu/docs/master/site/advanced/plate... has some more details about different techniques and software packages. My understanding is that is basically identifies the 4-8 most prominent stars in the image and the angles between them and does a nearest neighbour search in a massive database. Pretty cool!