Cheryl gets time on the KPNO 4-m telescope to image globular clusters. She comes back from the telescope with 104 science quality 8 HDU 8x2048x4096 images in 3 bands. Cheryl wants to apply for more telescope time, but the deadline is one week.
She needs
- the Ra and Dec of every star in every image that she has to better than 1 arcsec in accuracy, and
- to align the images so she can coadd them (i.e. turn the images into one large panoramic image per band). These panoramic images must look good (i.e. not crappy) and also be good for photometry (i.e. have well-behaved combined PSF).
She does the following steps:
- She points her browser to astrometry.net
- She goes to use the engine, and enters her email address
- She uploads all the 104 images to astrometry.net in a single step by cutting and pasting a single line from astrometry.net into her terminal and pressing 'enter.'
- She gets an email notification indicating the solve run is done
- She runs the curl or wget command (which we give her) that gives her back all FITS files with correct WCS (i.e. only the subset of the files she uploaded which astrometry.net was able to fix)
She doesn't:
- Have root privileges on her computer
- Know how to install software (including Java)
- Have an up-to-date operating system
- Know how to edit FITS headers
- Understand the WCS convention
- Have time for screwing around with arcane shell commands
- Have time for writing any code
- Care about detailed visualizations of the solutions and their quality
