Astrometry.net will hunt down and name objects in any amateur photo

A new search engine will soon turn your night sky images into powerful research data and identify the twinkling objects in them with just the click of a button.

The Astrometry.net database will hunt down and name celestial objects in any amateur photo, pinpoint the region of night sky that was photographed and use the image to expand a detailed database of the cosmos for use by scientists

David Hogg, an astronomer at New York University and leader of the project, showed off the still-in-development tool at the recent Astrophysics 2020 conference here at Johns Hopkins University's Space Telescope Science Institute.

"Any individual can take a picture of the sky, plug it in and learn what stars, galaxies or other objects are in their image," Hogg told SPACE.com. "It's fun for people to do this, but more importantly it'll provide data we need to make that image searchable and useful to scientists."

'Wiki' the sky
The project's driving force is astrometry: a branch of astronomy that relies on star positions to explain how they got there. Although stars may look stationary, they move in a slow "proper motion" from our Earthly vantage point.

"To understand the physics of a star cluster, you need to know the proper motions of stars in it," Hogg said, mentioning the Beehive Cluster in the constellation Cancer as an example. "When you run the clock back, you see the stars came out of some huge formation event."

The best way for astronomers to pin down the celestial motions—as well as keep tabs on the latest supernovae—is to take many images over time, Hogg explained. Problem is, monitoring the sky tedious and expensive.

Meanwhile, armies of amateurs scour the sky every minute of every day around the world. But most don't tag their images with "meta-data" scientists need, such as the exact time the photo was taken and location of the photographer on Earth at the time.

Hogg wants to change that.

"Amateurs with first-class equipment could really revolutionize how we think about doing this kind of science," he said, noting the search engine's ability to automatically tag random celestial images with the crucial meta-data.