Install astrometry-net with Homebrew, apt

Project links

• Homepage
• Upstream docs
• Package manager page

Commands and aliases

• an-fitstopnm
• an-pnmtofits
• astrometry-engine
• augment-xylist
• build-astrometry-index
• degtohms
• downsample-fits
• fit-wcs
• fits-column-merge
• fits-flip-endian
• fits-guess-scale
• fitsgetext
• get-healpix
• get-wcs
• hmstodeg
• hpsplit
• image2pnm
• image2xy
• imarith
• imstat
• listhead
• liststruc
• merge-columns
• modhead
• new-wcs
• pad-file
• plot-constellations
• plotann.py
• plotquad
• plotxy
• query-starkd
• removelines

Project history

The codebase dates to the Astrometry.net Team work by Michael Blanton, David W. Hogg, Dustin Lang, Keir Mierle, and Sam Roweis, with copyright notices beginning in 2006. The accompanying 2010 Astronomical Journal paper, 'Astrometry.net: Blind astrometric calibration of arbitrary astronomical images,' framed the project as a way to create correct astrometric metadata for useful astronomical images in archival disarray.

The official code README says the original code release backed up the claims in the paper for scientific repeatability, then became more robust and usable for a wider audience. That origin still shows in the package: it is not just a single solver binary, but a research-to-operations toolkit including HEALPIX support, kd-tree code, FITS utilities, index builders, and a web-service stack.

Adoption history

Astrometry.net adoption spans two modes: the hosted nova.astrometry.net web service for casual uploads and the local command-line solver for observatories, astrophotographers, pipelines, and archive processing. The README points users to the web service, the documentation, downloadable code snapshots, Docker containers, and index files.

Package-manager adoption is broad because local solving needs repeatable binaries and large offline index files. Homebrew, Debian, and Ubuntu package it, and the upstream README documents a Docker image invocation such as astrometrynet/solver:0.98 solve-field image.jpg for containerized use.

How it is used

The core CLI workflow is to install the code, download the index files appropriate for the field sizes being solved, optionally edit INSTALL_DIR/etc/astrometry.cfg, and run solve-field against an image, FITS file, URL, or xylist. The docs explain that the backend reads astrometry.cfg, normally /usr/local/astrometry/etc/astrometry.cfg, to find index files and control solver behavior.

solve-field is the main high-level command-line interface. It extracts sources, creates augmented xylists, calls the backend solver, and writes output files such as WCS and annotated products. Power users constrain scale, depth, radius, CPU limit, source extraction, plotting, and index selection for speed and reliability.

Why package nerds care

This is a package nerd favorite because it brings a serious scientific stack to a normal CLI install: dozens of executables, FITS table tools, plotting helpers, WCS transformers, and index builders all land on PATH. The real payload is split between packaged code and separately managed index data, so the package's usability depends on documentation, data placement, and config paths as much as on the binary itself.

It is also a canonical example of scientific reproducibility becoming operational infrastructure. The same algorithms that backed a journal paper became a web service, a Docker solver, distribution packages, and a local command-line workhorse used outside professional astronomy.

Timeline

• 2006: Copyright notices begin for the Astrometry.net Team code.
• 2010: The Astrometry.net blind astrometric calibration paper was published in The Astronomical Journal.
• 2012: The Sphinx documentation set identifies the project documentation authorship and code docs era.
• 2024: Upstream tags reached the 0.9x series, with 0.98 available in the documented Docker example.

Related projects

• nova.astrometry.net is the hosted web service using much of the same software.
• USNO-B, Tycho-2, 2MASS, and Gaia are reference catalogs used for index files.
• FITS and WCS standards are the file and metadata formats the command-line tools manipulate.

Sources

• https://astrometry.net/doc/changelog.html
• https://astrometry.net/doc/readme.html
• https://astrometrynet.readthedocs.io/en/latest/readme.html
• https://github.com/dstndstn/astrometry.net#readme