The estate now runs Astrometry.net itself (ankh-morpork-infra astrometry/):
solve-field against ~5 GB of local index files, sized from this repo's
TELESCOPES.md so the whole iTelescope fleet's fields of view are covered.
blind.py now tries it before nova.astrometry.net. Speed is the least of the
reasons - a blind solve of a real DSS field returns in 0.7s where nova queues
for minutes. The reasons that matter are that nova requires UPLOADING the
master to a third party and holding an API key, and neither is necessary any
more for the ordinary case. nova remains the fallback, so an estate outage
costs speed and privacy rather than the ability to solve.
pipeline/astrometry_net.py is the client and nothing more: stdlib-only POST,
parses the returned .wcs so the full TAN solution is used rather than a
re-derivation from the summary numbers. It deliberately does NOT decide whether
to trust a solution - blind.py already verifies every blind solve against Gaia
and applies a star-count and residual gate, and two gates that can disagree is
worse than one that is trusted.
The source ('estate' or 'nova') is threaded through the log lines, the returned
method, and the ASTRSOLV card, because a year from now that card is the only
way to tell whether a frame was solved in-house or uploaded.
Also corrected astrometry.py's 'cannot solve without a blind solver' message,
which has been untrue since run.py started falling through to blind.py.
Tested against the live service: blind solve of a DSS2 field with a known
centre returned within ~4 arcsec in 0.7s; the WCS round-trips through astropy;
and an unreachable service falls through to nova instead of raising.
Rule 2 of the workflow is that state lives in the repo rather than the
chat, and a long session had put most of the current position only in
the chat. This writes it down.
TODO.md gains a RESUME HERE block at the top, because the useful
question for the next session is not what has been done but what to do
next and what is blocking it. It names the three live strands, the three
decisions waiting on the user, and the one thing that will break the
batch run if it is forgotten: NGC 6744 mixes bin1 luminance at 4096x4096
with bin2 colour at 2048x2048, so registration has to resample onto a
common grid. Nothing else in the archive does that, which is exactly why
it will be forgotten. It also drops three duplicate "Done (recent)"
headings that had accumulated, and tabulates what the five archived
sessions actually contain.
NOTES.md gains the gotchas, all of which produced plausible wrong
answers rather than errors: every frame is delivered twice as calibrated
and raw, so extracting both silently doubles the stack; an interrupted
segmented download leaves DIRECTORIES named like files, which defeats
anything that trusts an extension; a re-mirror duplicates rather than
replaces; two T20 archives are genuinely corrupt; extraction triples the
disk footprint and filled the drive. Alongside them the analysis lessons
from NGC 5128, kept for the same reason - each is a way to be confidently
wrong.
DECISIONS.md records why the pipeline reads headers rather than
filenames, and why imaging is being made push-button while the science
stays hand-driven.
ARCHITECTURE.md described a documentation-only repository with no code,
which stopped being true when the pipeline merged in. It now covers all
three parts, the code-and-data separation the pipeline is built around,
and the on-disk session layout.
Both of this session's own errors are recorded in TODO.md as things not
to repeat: measuring a foreground star instead of the galaxy nucleus and
booking telescope time to fix it, and telling the user NGC 6744 had not
been processed when it had.
The mechanical merge preserved both histories but left two repositories
sitting side by side rather than one repository. This is the part that
makes it whole.
A top-level README explains the three strands - the telescope network
and campaign, the processing code, and in-person observing plans - and
says plainly that image data does not live here, because that is the
first question anyone will have when they find a pipeline with no
pixels.
state/PROJECT.md was still describing a markdown-only reference project
whose scope explicitly EXCLUDED automating bookings and image
processing. Both of those are now most of what the project does, so the
objective, scope and key facts are rewritten to match reality.
state/DECISIONS.md records why the merge happened - the two repos were
split by chronology rather than design, and the seam was already
leaking, with the campaign's TODO citing results held in the other repo
and the pipeline's README explaining a campaign it did not contain. It
also records that the image data deliberately stays out of the
repository.
state/TODO.md gains the pipeline and observing work that previously had
nowhere to live, including the measurement that changes the pipeline
plan: per-frame processing is 2.9 seconds and the whole 24-frame session
is 1.1 minutes single-threaded, so a scheduler earns nothing on stacking
and should be pointed at the Monte Carlo stages instead.
Internal links fixed for the new paths: pipeline/README.md referred to
session-scripts/ throughout, and itelescope/README.md pointed at a
state/ directory that is now one level up.
The .gitignore conflict between the two repositories is resolved by
combining them, with image formats ignored globally except under docs/,
where documentation figures are committed deliberately.
Adds TELESCOPES.md, a per-observatory review of every telescope on the
iTelescope.net network with a spec block and an assessment for each, a
'choosing a telescope' use-case table, and general observations (CCD to CMOS
migration, Bin2 software limits, elevation limits, network-side calibration).
Data sourcing:
- data/itelescope-telescopes.csv is a verbatim CSV export of iTelescope's
maintained specs Google Sheet (24 rows: 23 active scopes + T74 placeholder).
- The support article (Freshdesk 247371) supplied observatory groupings and
minimum elevation limits; it still lists T9/T19/T31/T69 which the sheet has
dropped - the review follows the sheet and records the discrepancy.
- go.itelescope.net is an authenticated app shell; nothing was scraped from it.
Also fills in the remaining state/ files: TODO (pending: T74 specs, retired
scope reconciliation, periodic sheet refresh), DECISIONS (source-of-truth
choice, single-document structure, no launchpad scraping), NOTES (refresh
command, CSV quirks), ARCHITECTURE (repo layout), and README.
