Anyone remember my brief musing on a satellite-free alternative to GPS a while back? Well, an interesting project by the name of Astrometry.net has come to my attention recently. They aim to develop a system that is able to take sky images with incomplete or entirely absent meta-data and use image analysis and a neat astronomical database matching algorithm to generate accurate sky position and orientation matches.
This system has the potential to auto-catalog and verify vast swaths of disorganized sky images, making the astronomical catalogs at various institutions cross-comparable for the first time. Plus, if the project continues to stay open (it’s open source now), there’s the potential that one could make additional extensions to the technology.
Naturally, the notion that pops to mind is an application where people can take digital time-stamped pictures of the night sky, and use the astrometric matches along with the time to make Earth-position calculations. My best wishes for the astrometry.net crew, they’ve taken on a big challenge.
Although I support the great bounds that technology is making in astronomy and navigation, I try to teach people a form of satellite free GPS. It’s compass, map, sextant, astrolabe, kamal… free also! It’s the rare, but traditional skill of natural navigation.