Automatic Georeferencing of Astronaut Auroral Photography

Abstract:

Astronauts on board the International Space Station have taken thousands of high quality photographs of the aurorae borealis and australis with a high temporal and spatial resolution. A barrier to these photographs being used in research is that the cameras do not have a fixed orientation and the images therefore do not have any pointing information associated with them. Using astrometry.net and other open source libraries we have developed a software toolkit to automatically reconstruct the pointing of the images from the visible starfield and hence project the auroral images in geographic and geomagnetic coordinates. Here we explain the technique and the resulting data products, which will soon be publically available through the project website.