How do you identify unknown objects in your images?

[Moon]

I'm sure there are a many ways to do this, just curious what clever techniques IISers are using.

James

[steve000]

heavens above, stellarium and google usually for me. but I dont image much

[Merlin66]

There are a few "plate solving" websites...all you need is an approx centre coordinate...
Generally I just use the overlay/ blink function in Cartes du Ciel. With the added UCAC star catalogues (very faint stars!), the latest Comet and Asteroid data, it usually does the job.

[mithrandir]

Ken mentioned plate solving web sites. astrometry.net can solve most images and does not ask for a hint. UniMap runs under Windows and solves most images but a hint as to the center and field of view makes it run a lot faster. Unfortunately it doesn't use the UCAC catalogs which is a shame because I have copies of UCAC3 and UCAC4.

[Moon]

These are the ones I have tried:
- TheSky6 Image link : Ok when it works, but very unreliable. Is there a trick to make it work all the time? Is TheSkyX any better?

- http://astrometry.net/ is very reliable but the catalogue is too limited. The hyperlink to overlay the image in google sky is great, but the performance is too slow to be usable.

- Maxim DL - works well (here is my method (http://deepspaceplace.com/maximdltips.php)) but only works for FITS files that have been plate solved. i don;'t think you can import a JPG and solve it.

I got a PM recommending Aladin - I should try that again.

Ken - I'll have to try Cartes du Ciel again too - I reinstalled it last night.

James

[RickS]

PixInsight has an AnnotateImage script that will label a plate solved image with NGC and IC objects, PGC galaxies, named stars and stars from the Tycho 2 catalog.

[Merlin66]

The Star Atlas in AstroArt5 can also be used to identify stars, NGC, IC, and Messier objects as well as Asteroids and Comets.
Part of the Astrometry function....

[Terry B]

If you can identify the centre of you images and need to identify particular objects then there are thousands of catalogues available as overlays using Aladin.
See http://aladin.u-strasbg.fr/aladin.gml

[cfranks]

TheSkyX Image link works every time for me. Fairly simple to setup.

Charles

[frolinmod]

Image Link in the current version of TheSkyX is much improved over Image Link in TheSky6. It's faster, far more reliable and handles much larger fields of view. TheSkyX also works well with UCAC4. For really small fields of view it works well with NOMAD, but I leave that catalog turned off most of the time because it just slows things down at normal fields of view.