ASRU Astral Survey
Research Union

The member image pipeline is open for submissions

By Hana Kowalczyk

Three people in silhouette around a large amateur telescope on a mount under a starry sky.
Amateur astronomers at the Grand Canyon Star Party. Image: Grand Canyon National Park Service, public domain

Several of our members image the sky with their own telescopes and cameras, and until now each of us processed those images in a different way. From today there is one shared route.

Members can upload raw frames together with their calibration frames (bias, darks and flats) to the shared store. The pipeline then:

  • checks the files and their headers,
  • calibrates the frames,
  • works out exactly where each frame points on the sky (plate solving),
  • measures image quality, and
  • produces a catalog of the sources it finds, matched against Gaia.

Each submission gets a short report back, so you can see whether your focus, guiding or flats need attention. The details are in ASRU-TN-2026-001.

The pipeline is still young. During testing it solved about nine in ten frames; the rest failed mostly because of missing pixel-scale information or too few stars. If your frames fail, the report will say why, and Tomás Herrera Díaz has written a guide to the most common problems.

Only members can submit for now. Submitted images stay the property of the person who took them; see our data and image policy.