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I take pictures of deep sky objects and I would like to make a celestial map that contains the pictures in the right position in the sky. Ideally something like stellarium. (but in stellarium it's hard and you have generated stars on top of the pictures). it would be nice to have automatic plate solving, but otherwise I can try to use an external plate solver and provide to software/library directly the fits file. The method should accept colored images, I see many software that handle only gray fits files. In other words a 3D black sphere where the pictures are automatically positioned, and the possibility to render a part of the 3D map or the entire map, or navigate like in stellarium. I prefer linux software or python3 scripts/libraries. Thanks!

Davide
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  • If you like Python then you will love Blender and Blender SE! It's a free and open source animation and rendering package that can be run by GUI or scripted by python. Tons of tutorials in YouTube. The term is "UV mapping" (u and v are local coordinate for an image mapped on to a surface). The site is very active, here are a few old questions of mine: 1, 2, 3 – uhoh Feb 10 '21 at 22:18
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    thanks for the suggestion, I know blender, but I'm looking something more astronomical where I can estimate the position of the image in the sky (plate solving) and put automatically the image in the right position in the sky (according to the estimated coordinate). or a software that accept fits files (with already coordinates) and place all the images in the right place according to the coordinates in the filts files and generate a map. – Davide Feb 10 '21 at 22:35
  • Oh I think I don't understand the question. Probably things like Celestia or Stelarium or Universe Sandbox wouldn't help even if you could add images? As far as "I see many software that handle only gray fits files." why not add an example of something that does do what you need (or is at least close to it) except for the gray scale images? That might better illustrate the functionality you need. The more specific information you can add to the question, the better. Thanks! – uhoh Feb 10 '21 at 22:42
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    I'll add more info, Ideally something like stellarium: deep sky objects pictures on this virtual 3D sphere (the sky), but in stellarium is a bit complicated and you will have stars generated by the program on top of the pictures, which I don't want. – Davide Feb 10 '21 at 22:47
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    maybe blender or plugin is good as well, but it has to be simple to automatically visualize a fits file (with sky coordinate) on the 3D sphere as stellarium. If I have to manually place the image it's a bit complicated. – Davide Feb 10 '21 at 23:00

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