TORONTO - Amateur photographers and astronomers will soon be able to navigate the night sky using a computer program developed at the University of Toronto.
The computer program is in its testing phase and helps people identify what they're looking at when they look up at a star-filled sky, said the project's supervisor Sam Roweis.
"The idea is that you give (the program) an image of the night sky, and it figures out which stars the image contains," said Dustin Lang, one of the lead computer programmers working on the project.
"There are tons of amateur astronomers taking great pictures, but they rarely record exactly where their telescopes were pointing," said Lang.
The goal of this project is to identify the stars that people are looking at, he said.
The program - which was developed in collaboration with astronomers at New York University - can solve images taken with film, digital cameras, amateur telescopes and heavy-duty space telescopes.
People simply upload star-filled photos to the program's website and the program matches the photos to images in its star database within seconds, said Roweis.
The program's star index is based on a large standard astronomical catalogue from the United States Naval Observatory, he said.
"The database basically looks for patterns in terms of where stars are in relation to each other," said Roweis.
"It's a bit like going outside on a dark night and trying to find the constellations," said Lang.
Right now, Lang says there are several astronomers testing the program on the project's website.
The system is currently geared towards professional astronomers, but Lang says he's hoping to launch a similar program that targets amateur astronomers and "anyone who has looked up at the sky and wondered."
Roweis says once the testing phase is over and all the kinks are worked out, he plans on releasing the computer program's code to the public.
Releasing the code will let people use it on their own computers or incorporate pieces of the code into other computer systems, said Roweis.
In the future he says he'd like to see the project become a version of Google Earth for the sky.
Roweis said he's going to be on sabbatical with Google this summer and has proposed the star-finder program as one of his projects.
Although the project is still in its testing phase, it's up and running at astrometry.net.
