About Watney

---

The Watney Astrometry Engine is an astrometric solver as a .NET/C# library. It was built mainly for solving images in amateur astrophotography. Its implementation is based on the same basic algorithm that Han Kleijn's ASTAP implemented (and is described in more detail here). While the solving algorithm uses the same principles, that is probably where the similarities end.

The solver was designed from the beginning as a library with no dependencies. It is implemented as a .NET Standard 2.0 library. This provides compatibility with both .NET Framework and .NET Core 2.0 and later as well as .NET 5 and 6. This way if anyone wants to embed Watney to their .NET based apps, very little effort is required. A console based solver is provided for the basic use cases of locally solving images, and a standalone ASP.NET API application is provided for any wider needs like sharing a solver instance to a group of people. And of course since the solver is a code library, you're free to develop your own apps for whatever needs you might have.

This web solver here acts as a live demo for the solver. However, it's not meant for widespread active use as it's more of a showcase than a service provided for the community. This web solver runs in the Azure cloud, leveraging serverless computing in the form of Azure Functions to do the heavy lifting. Blind solver jobs are split and then distributed to be processed by multiple nodes concurrently, allowing the low compute tier nodes to perform the solver calculations in a relatively timely fashion.

Visit github.com/Jusas/WatneyAstrometry for more information and to read the full documentation.