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Found In Space (On Flickr)

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the now-that's-clever dept.

Jamie stumbled upon a writeup for all you astronomy and photography buffs out there (Perhaps my Dad or Uncle Jim are reading ;). From the writeup "The 'blind astrometry server' is a program which monitors the Astrometry group on Flickr, looking for new photos of the night sky. It then analyzes each photo, and from the unique star positions shown it figures out what part of the sky was photographed and what interesting planets, galaxies or nebulae are contained within. Not only does the photographer get a high-quality description of what's in their photo, but the main Astrometry.net project gets a new image to add to its storehouse of knowledge." Check out the Astrometry.net site for many cool pictures.

6 of 48 comments (clear)

  1. Astrometry.net and Comet Lulin by fyngyrz · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I use them all the time; just shot comet Lulin, they did a great job of exact location:

    --
    I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
  2. Find any killer asteroids yet? by heroine · · Score: 4, Insightful

    It's only a matter of time before The Goog aggregates all pictures of the sky in realtime to find killer asteroids & make weather forecasts.

    1. Re:Find any killer asteroids yet? by 0xdeadbeef · · Score: 5, Funny

      It will probably find evidence of vast machine intelligences like itself and decide not to tell us.

  3. Re:sounds like a good time by plover · · Score: 5, Funny

    to confuse the shit out of someone with photo of a backlit piece of black card with random pinpricks in it.

    Sounds like something a random prick would do.

    --
    John
  4. Re:Very cool, but np-complete? by drom · · Score: 5, Informative

    You can think of our search as randomly trying millions of possibilities and hoping for the best. The reason it's so fast is that we order the random attempts very cleverly and tend to find the answer fast if it is indeed solvable. The algorithm usually terminates because it finds a match or times out; rarely does it exhaust the search space in time. The actual complexity of our system is roughly O(N choose 4) where N is the number of stars in the image. Interestingly, this is polynomial, roughly O(N^4), though probably closer to O(N^5) once verification is added.

    In summary: the astrometry problem is not NP-hard when approached like we do.

    Disclaimer: I am one of the astrometry.net contributors.

    --
    python -c "import string,re;print string.join(map(lambda x:chr(string.atoi(x,36)),re.findall('..','2z2t2x36
  5. Whoo would have known? by fava · · Score: 4, Insightful

    When these kinds of services (meaning flicker et al) open up their api to public use there are always some who cant figure out why.

    Well folks, this is the reason why.

    I betting when the executives at flicker sat down to decide if they were going top open up the api, they had no idea that someone would use it to create a map of the sky.