DISC-SKYMAP CODE DISTRIBUTION:

Indexing Astronomical Objects

A system for indexing massive catalogs of celestial objects by declination and right ascension, which supports fast retrieval of close approximate matches.

The DISC-SkyMap system is for indexing astronomical objects in standard equatorial coordinates. It supports matching new observations to the catalog, and allow retrieval of close approximate matches, thus accounting for distortions due to atmospheric fluctuations and optics imperfections.

   
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MAIN FEATURES

• Fast retrieval of exact and close approximate matches, based on the location and apparent magnitude (i.e. brightness) of objects.
• Fast identification of newly observed objects that are not in the catalog, and real-time update of the catalog to include them.
• Scalability suitable for catalogs with billions of objects and processing hundreds of thousands of observed objects per second.
  
  

LIMITATIONS

• The current system does not include a distributed version. We aim to implement it by the end of 2011, and we expect that it will increase the processing speed by two orders of magnitude.
• The system retrieves only close approximate matches. It finds catalog matches within one arc-second from the observed object. This close matching is sufficient to account for optical and atmospheric distortions, but it does not allow tracking of objects that actually move through the sky, such as asteroids. We plan to develop techniques for tracking of moving objects as part of the future work.

Please review our software license.