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Software - Astrometrica

Troubleshooting - Astrometrica Fails to match stars with the reference catalogue

This can occur when you are trying to obtain an accurate position for your asteroid or you are tracking and stacking images. You receive an error in a pop-up window saying Reference Star Match Error.

 

 

 

Although you can try to manually match the reference stars, what this usually indicates is that your data has some problems. In this particular case, it is having difficulty matching the image EY-7.fit with the USNO-B1.0 catalogue. If we look at that particular image, we can see there is a white stripe across the middle of it. Something has gone wrong when this image was extracted from the detector, and this resulted in this artificial feature. This white stripe has confused Astrometrica and therefore it does not know how to match this image to what it finds in the USNO-B1.0 catalogue. In this case, it is best to simply not use this image.

Other reasons you might find this error occuring:

  • if there are very few stars in the image, perhaps due to clouds. Again, it is probably better not to use images of such poor quality.
  • if you are not using the USNO-B1.0 catalogue for your reference stars. You should make sure you have selected the USNO-B1.0 catalogue in the Program Tab of Astrometrica's settings. If you are unable to use the online version (due to firewall issues), please follow the instructions on how to download relevant portions of the USNO-B1.0 catalogue for your analysis.
  • if the information in the header of your image is incorrect. If the information about the RA, DEC, DATE, or UTSTART and UTSTOP times is incorrect, your data is, unfortunately, useless.

Return to the Astrometrica page

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