Tutorial¶
A simple usage example¶
Note
Check this Jupyter notebook for a more complete example.
Suppose we have two images of about the same portion of the sky, and we would like to transform one of them to fit on top of the other one. Suppose we do not have WCS information, but we are confident that we could do it by eye, by matching some obvious asterisms on the two images.
In this particular use case, astroalign can be of great help to automatize the process.
After we load our images into numpy arrays, we simple choose one to be the source image to be transformed and the other to be the target.
Note
astroalign will also accept as input, data objects with data and mask properties, like NDData, CCDData and Numpy masked arrays. For more information, see Dealing with Data Objects with data and mask properties (NDData, CCDData, Numpy masked arrays)
The usage for this simple most common case would be as follows:
>>> import astroalign as aa
>>> registered_image, footprint = aa.register(source, target)
registered_image
is now a transformed (numpy array) image of source
that will match pixel to pixel to target
.
footprint
is a boolean numpy array, True for masked pixels with no information.
Warning
Flux may not be conserved after the transformation.
Mask Fill Value¶
If you need to mask the aligned image with a special value over the region where transformation had no pixel information, you can use the footprint mask to do so:
>>> registered_image, footprint = aa.register(source, target)
>>> registered_image[footprint] = -99999.99
Or you can pass the value to the fill_value argument:
>>> registered_image, footprint = aa.register(source, target, fill_value=-99999.99)
Both will yield the same result.
Finding the transformation¶
In some cases it may be necessary to inspect first the transformation parameters before applying it,
or we may be interested only in a star to star correspondence between the images.
For those cases, we can use find_transform
.
find_transform
will return a scikit-image SimilarityTransform object that encapsulates the matrix transformation,
and the transformation parameters.
It will also return a tuple with two lists of star positions of source
and its corresponding ordered star postions on
the target
image.:
>>> transf, (source_list, target_list) = aa.find_transform(source, target)
source and target here can be either numpy arrays of the image pixels, or any iterable (x, y) pair, corresponding to a star position.
The transformation parameters can be found in transf.rotation
, transf.traslation
, transf.scale
and the transformation matrix in transf.params
.
If the transformation is satisfactory, we can apply it to the image with apply_transform
.
Continuing our example:
>>> if transf.rotation > MIN_ROT:
... registered_image = aa.apply_transform(transf, source, target)
If you know the star-to-star correspondence¶
Note
estimate_transform from scikit-image is imported into astroalign as a convenience.
If for any reason you know which star corresponds to which other, you can call estimate_transform
.
Let us suppose we know the correspondence:
- (127.03, 85.98) in source –> (175.13, 111.36) in target
- (23.11, 31.87) in source –> (0.58, 119.04) in target
- (98.84, 142.99) in source –> (181.55, 206.49) in target
- (150.93, 85.02) in source –> (205.60, 91.89) in target
- (137.99, 12.88) in source –> (134.61, 7.94) in target
Then we can estimate the transform:
>>> src = np.array([(127.03, 85.98), (23.11, 31.87), (98.84, 142.99),
... (150.93, 85.02), (137.99, 12.88)])
>>> dst = np.array([(175.13, 111.36), (0.58, 119.04), (181.55, 206.49),
... (205.60, 91.89), (134.61, 7.94)])
>>> tform = aa.estimate_transform('affine', src, dst)
And apply it to an image with apply_transform
or to a set of points with matrix_transform
.
Applying a transformation to a set of points¶
Note
matrix_transform from scikit-image is imported into astroalign as a convenience.
To apply a known transform to a set of points, we use matrix_transform. Following the example in the previous section:
>>> dst_calc = aa.matrix_transform(src, tform.params)
dst_calc
should be a 5 by 2 array similar to the dst
array.
Dealing with Data Objects with data and mask properties (NDData, CCDData, Numpy masked arrays)¶
If your input data comes in the form of ccdproc’s CCDData or astropy’s NDData or a numpy masked array, there are a few ways to interact with astroalign.
In general, for objects with data and mask properties, it is convenient to transform their masks along with the data and to add the footprint onto the mask.
Astroalign provides this functionality with the propagate_mask argument to register and apply_transform.
For example:
>>> from astropy.nddata import NDData
>>> nd = NDData([[0, 1], [2, 3]], [[True, False], [False, False]])
and we want to apply a clockwise 90 degree rotation:
>>> import numpy as np
>>> from skimage.transform import SimilarityTransform
>>> transf = SimilarityTransform(rotation=np.pi/2., translation=(1, 0))
Then we can call astroalign as usual, but with the propagate_mask set to True:
>>> aligned_image, footprint = aa.apply_transform(transf, nd, nd, propagate_mask=True)
This will transform nd.data and nd.mask simultaneously and add the footprint mask from the transformation onto nd.mask:
>>> aligned_image
array([[2., 0.],
[3., 1.]])
>>> footprint
array([[False, True],
[False, False]])
Creating a new object of the same input type is now easier:
>>> new_nd = NDData(aligned_image, mask=footprint)
The same will apply for CCDData objects and Numpy masked arrays.
Dealing with hot pixels¶
Hot pixels always appear on the same position of the CCD. If your image is dominated by hot pixels, the source detection algorithm may pick those up and output the identity tranformation.
To avoid this, you can use CCDProc’s cosmicray_lacosmic to clean the image before trying registration:
from ccdproc import cosmicray_lacosmic as lacosmic
clean_image = lacosmic(myimage)
See Module API for the API specification.