What is Space Pixels ?
SpacePixels is an astronomical image (FITS) manipulation tool supporting object detection (asteroids, comets, spacecraft, ...). It is intended to be an easy-to-use tool for amateur astronomers. The input to SpacePixels is a set of aligned and calibrated images (which can be generated by stacking software such as Deep Sky Stacker) and it can do the following:
- Stretch and blink (animate) a set of FITS images to visually detect moving objects
- Batch stretch a set of FITS files with custom nonlinear stretch algorithms
- Batch convert a set of FITS files to monochrome
- Plate solve a FITS image either using ASTAP (local installation required) or Astrometry.net (online)
- Apply a plate solution coordinates to the FITS header of a set of images (as all input images are expected to be the same size and aligned, the solution applies to all of them)
The next major release is planned to perform automatic moving object detection.
The software is currently still in alpha version.
For automatic object detection, SpacePixels was successfully tested with the A-Track object detection software (https://github.com/akdeniz-uzay/A-Track ), in this case SpacePixels conveniently generated the input for A-Track (by batch plate solving, stretching and converting to monochrome a set of FITS files).
You can check out the videos below for an introduction to SpacePixels.
Why I created SpacePixels.
Quick Tutorial.
You can download the latest release form the link below.
Download the distribution and run SpacePixels.bat (you need to have java 11 and above installed)
or
gradlew run
gradlew distZip