We’ve just released another great update to Observatory. This time we have integrated the services provided by astrometry.net to bring blind plate solving to Observatory. Choose the new Blind Match command to plate solve your images without providing an estimate of the image center and scale.

I think plate solving cannot be much easier than this:

Note that since blind plate solving uses an internet service, its performance varies widely, taking anywhere from a few seconds to several minutes per image. Time compression was used for parts of the video above.

In addition to the new blind plate solver, we have enhanced the photometry inspector with error estimates. We have improved the way it automatically populates the magnitude field of the comparison star, and automatically sets its estimated error based on the catalog used.

See the release notes for the complete list of changes and bug fixes.

Enjoy!