The autoastrom script relies primarily on the Starlink::Autoastrom Perl module, which relies on a
number of other Perl modules which, in turn, rely on a number of Starlink software tools. All of these
tools should be up-to-date if you are using a Starlink distribution as obtained from the Starlink CVS
repository.
The pattern matching facilities which autoastrom relies come from the FINDOFF application within
Ccdpack. There are further details in SUN/139. You need version 4.0-1 at least, and the program
respects any setting of the CCDPACK_DIR environment variable.
autoastrom requires AST 1.8-1 or better. See SUN/211 on information about AST.
Object detection is performed by Extractor, which is the Starlink version of Emmanuel Bertin’s SExtractor. Extractor is documented in SUN/226. See also the SExtractor manual MUD/165, the home of SExtractor on the web [3], the distribution location [2], and the original SExtractor article [1].
If you need to supply the inital astrometry which autoastrom requires, you can do that using Gaia.
This is documented in SUN/214, but it’s very easy to use, and you might be best to simply start it up
(give the command gaia image_name, presuming you have already done the initialisation to use
Starlink software) and experiment.
The environment variable ASTROM_DIR points to the installed location of ASTROM, CCDPACK_DIR points
to Ccdpack, and EXTRACTOR_DIR points to SExtractor. All of these environment variables will be set up
for you when you do the initialisation to use Starlink software.
autoastrom has, through its use of the Astro::Correlate Perl module, a flexible extension
mechanism for the matching of objects between those found on the CCD and those downloaded from
an online catalogue.
For further information on creating new plugins, see the documentation for the Astro::Correlate
Perl module, which can be found on CPAN.