Solving for coords of asteroid on your image

[ric...@yahoo.com]

I'm new; would like to design a lab for my non-science students in Astro Lab which involves them finding the orbital parameters of an asteroid from a semester's images of that asteroid. I'm hoping that Astrometry.net has the capability to submit an image, tag an asteroid, and have the software come back with RA/Dec for that asteroid. However, after looking at Astrometry.net, I'm not sure that's in it's wheelhouse. It seems it may just be for identifying stars and deep sky objects on an image. Can someone lead me to where it's described to do what I want to do? Next, and likely outside Astrometry.net, I'll want to find software to take a series of date/time and coords and turn it into an orbital solution.

[Dustin Lang]

Hi,

The "WCS" files produced by astrometry.net can be used to convert between RA,Dec and x,y position in the image.  The web site doesn't have any tools to do that, but the code package does -- wcs-xy2rd.

cheers,
--dustin