Plate Solver

An astrometry.net plate-solving service wrapped up in a Docker image.

This service will watch a directory for incoming files and plate-solve them.

Canon CR2 files will be converted to FITS before solving.

Using plate-solver

Get Docker

You will need to have Docker up and running on your system. The official docs provide some ways to do this, but a simple way is:

curl -fsSL https://get.docker.com -o get-docker.sh
sh get-docker.sh

Note: you will probably need to restart or logout of current session before this works properly. The above script will tell you what to do.

Get plate-solver

Once you have the docker command on your system you will need to pull the panoptes-plate-solver image from the Google Cloud Registry servers:

docker pull gcr.io/panoptes-exp/panoptes-plate-solver

Use plate-solver

This service will perform the following:

• Attempt to extract a thumbnail from any .cr2 files.
• Convert any .cr2 files to .fits files.
• Plate-solve any .fits files.

Directories

The docker container has an /incoming and /outgoing directory that should be mapped to the host directories you want to watch. These directories should exist before you run the container.

Note: you should not set the incoming directory to be the same as the outgoing directory.

Solve options

The default plate-solve options are:

SOLVE_OPTS="--guess-scale --no-verify --downsample 4 --temp-axy --no-plots"

which can be changed when running the container. See example below.

The watchdog library provides the underlying event and handler class support.

Example

# Map image directories to /incoming and /outgoing and set custom plate-solve options.
docker run --rm -it \
  -v "$PWD/images/:/incoming" \
  -v "$PWD/solved/:/outgoing" \
  -e SOLVE_OPTS="--guess-scale --no-verify --downsample 2 --no-plots" \
  gcr.io/panoptes-exp/panoptes-plate-solver