How to match extracted spots from star image to star catalog

Question

I have used https://photutils.readthedocs.io/en/stable/ to extract star spots from my FITS image, which is relatively easy and neatly managed in python.
Now I want to match extracted "possible" stars from my image to a stars from the catalog to get star RA DEC coordinates of every pixel. Has anyone done this already in python? Or has some instructions?

Answer 1

You can download, build and run the astrometry.net code locally

https://astrometrynet.readthedocs.io/en/latest/build.html

http://astrometry.net/doc/readme.html#tricks-and-tips

The solve-field program has optional parameters that speed up the search

SOLVE-FIELD(1)                  astrometry.net                  SOLVE-FIELD(1)

NAME
       solve-field - Main high-level command-line user interface.

SYNOPSIS
       solve-field  [options]  [image-file-1  image-file-2  ...]  [xyls-file-1
       xyls-file-2 ...]

[...]

   -3 RA, --ra RA
          RA of field center for search, format: degrees or hh:mm:ss

   -4 DEC, --dec DEC
          DEC of field center for search, format: degrees or hh:mm:ss

   -5 degrees, --radius degrees
          Only search in indexes within 'radius' of the field center given
          by --ra and --dec

   -d, --depth number or range
          Number  of  field  objects to look at, or range of numbers; 1 is
          the brightest star, so "-d 10" or "-d 1-10" mean look at the top
          ten brightest stars only.

   --objs int
          Cut  the  source list to have this many items (after sorting, if
          applicable).

[...]

   -z, --downsample int
          Downsample the image by factor int before running source extraction