iraf.net

I have a series of fits images showing a source moving across a fixed telescope. I want to use iraf to track the motion of the source. I've been using the minmax function but the source is quite large (The images were taken with low quality hardware). This means that, because the point within the source that has the maximum intensity varies, there is a large error (of about +/- 20 pixels).I was wondering if there was any function or method that would be more accurate. Possibly one that took the shape of the source into account and measured the centre? My main issue is that there are ~3000 images to go through so I want to set up a script to do the work so I can't use functions that require too much interaction like daofind appears to.

Without knowing what this 'large source' might look like, it's hard to make specific suggestions (e.g. tracking the moon and a comet are different problems). A slightly better approach might be to use a task like IMCNTR in the PROTO package to find the centroid of a box, perhaps using the max value as a starting point. If your source is very diffuse or irregular this may not be much improvement.Another approach might be to use a task like BLKAVG to block average the images to decrease the resolution but sum the pixels, the min/max approach might work more consistently here but then you'd need to account for the block averaging in determining position, or at least getting a better starting position for the first suggestion.If you're doing something like examining video-frame grabs of a fireball, or satellite tracking, then there isn't anything in the system specifically designed for this. Hope this helps.