Inspiration
Astrophotography has been a hobby of one of our teammates for a while, and a few of us have had experience with image processing in other settings (robotics). Therefore, we sought to combine these skills and hobbies and decided to implement an algorithm that uses image processing to identify, align, and stack images of stars!
What it does
The APA takes in a series of images of stars that have moved some amount and stacks them. This means that stars are identified in each image and an algorithm matches and aligns the stars across images. Then, we are able to combine the data between the transformed images to create one image that contains all of the data across a set of images. This is beneficial because it does not create motion artifacts that arise from taking one 2-minute exposure of the sky, but retains the same amount of data.
How we built it
We used Java, JavaFX, and OpenCV to build out project. JavaFX was used to develop the front end of our project, while Java was used to implement most of the registration algorithm used to mind matching stars in two images. Also, Python and OpenCV was used to identify stars in images.
Challenges we ran into
The algorithm turned out to be a lot more complicated then we anticipated!
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