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Implement minimal plate solving + overlay - #1

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sn0opy merged 2 commits into
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feat/plate-solve
Oct 19, 2026
Merged

sn0opy merged 2 commits into
mainfrom
feat/plate-solve

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@sn0opy sn0opy commented Oct 19, 2026 •

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  • Coordinates are read from the file's header
  • If the image has no coordinates, a minimal plate solve is done based on roughly 12M of the brightest stars from the Gaia DR3 catalog
  • An overlay shows a grid and interesting targets from several catalogs compiled via https://github.com/mattiaverga/openngc

These catalogs increase the file size by about 5 megabytes which is fine in my opinion. Due to the small catalog, there's a chance the plate-solve fails, but it also results in plate-solving in less than 100 milliseconds per frame.

The HFR pass read pixels around the refined centroid without checking bounds, so a
centroid pulled toward the edge (seen on a star mask) panicked with an out-of-bounds
index. The app caught it as "no stars"; now the star is skipped instead.
Every image is plate solved in the background after star detection, near the
header's pointing (RA / DEC or OBJCTRA / OBJCTDEC) and pixel scale (FOCALLEN and
XPIXSZ). P toggles an annotation with an RA / Dec grid, deep-sky object outlines and a
north / east compass; the info overlay shows the solution.

- catalog: the 30 brightest Gaia DR3 stars per ~1 deg² cell (1.23M stars, 4 bytes
  each, ~5 MB), positions at 2026.0
- solve: triangle matching between the brightest image points and catalog stars in
  tiles around the hint, then an iterated least-squares TAN fit
- stars: bright points for solving, including the saturated stars HFR skips
- dso: OpenNGC objects (~215 KB)
- examples: catalog / DSO builders and a command-line solver; data rebuilt with
  scripts/build-catalog.sh

Behind the blip-core `solve` feature, so the web build doesn't carry the data.
@sn0opy
sn0opy merged commit b65e236 into main Oct 19, 2026
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sn0opy deleted the feat/plate-solve branch October 19, 2026 18:48
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