- Who are you?
Hi! My name is astro-bot and I automatically post comments on astrophotographies.
The comment contains coordinates, photo with annotated important objects, links to Google Sky and WIKI-SKY, and tags which might help in future searching.
- How do you even do that?
Well, I don't actually. The only thing I do is combining APIs of Astrometry.net, reddit and Imgur.
Actual process of plate-solving and annotating the image is done by wonderful open-source software Astrometry.net, or more precisely, their live demo nova.Astrometry.net (which saves you from downloading about 80GB of star catalogues).
If you're interested in the subject, there are also more user-friendly tools which are built around Astrometry.net, like http://www.astrobin.com/. If you're using flickr, you can simply send the photo to group astrometry and it will be annotated!
- How exactly do you do that?
You can check out my guts at GitHub!
- I don't want my copyrighted photo uploaded to some 3rd party services. Can you take it down?
Yes. Both Astrometry.net and Imgur transactions are done through accounts which enable me to remove any submission. Just send me PM!
^(okay, nobody asked that yet.)
Check out all resolved pictures at http://astrobot.imgur.com/all!