Star Finder - Find stars within a picture

If you have a photograph and want to identify which part of the night sky it represents, then you have found the website that can do this for you. To get a feel for what it does, here is a simulated result below - move the mouse over the picture to see the representative stars.

If you are ready to start, click here to go to the star finder website.

If the above link doesn't work, please inform the webmaster by sending an email here:

This website is dynamic!

Currently, the capabilities of the star finder is very lacking (buggy). For example, you have to have at least 5 stars in the picture of magnitude 7 or brighter. For shots of the night sky that include 10 degrees or more, this is usually not a problem. For shots of the night sky through a telescope, or through a telephoto lens > 150mm this gets difficult to impossible. I have plans to speed up the algorithm by over 100 times and after I do this I will allow dimmer stars than magnitude 7.

I plan to add lots of features. Email me if you found the site useful. This will motivate me to make it better.

Version 1.0 Jan 18 2005 Initial release. Index includes: [mag 7.0] [4 neighboring stars] benchmark: 14.9 seconds

Example of results:

Move the mouse over the picture to see the star chart for this photograph:

Brightest star (with blue dots) is:
Mag: 2.9
RA: 3h 47.5m
Dec: 24.1
Dimmest star (with blue dots) is mag: 4.2
Picture is about 5.266 degrees wide