astropy / astropy/astroquery

Returned wcs header has 100s of header cards added {astrometry.net}

Open
#2,748 10 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub
astrometry.net
Dominant language
Python
Stars
791
Forks
451
Avg merge
1d 3h
Merged PRs (30d)
4

Description

I'm finding that returned solved WCS headers have hundreds of header keys added. Here is an example of the cards numbers:
```
No. Name Ver Type Cards Dimensions Format
0 PRIMARY 1 PrimaryHDU 718 (3072, 2047) int16 (rescales to uint16)
1 MASK 1 ImageHDU 8 (3072, 2047) uint8
2 UNCERT 1 ImageHDU 9 (3072, 2047) float64
```
An example of one of the added keys:
```
COMMENT /data/INDEXES/index-5200-LITE/index-5206-46.fits
COMMENT Index(353):
COMMENT /data/INDEXES/index-5200-LITE/index-5206-47.fits
COMMENT Field name: job.axy
```
It seems that this behaviour comes from this line in the `monitor_submission` function of the astrometryNet class
```
wcs = fits.Header.fromstring(wcs_response.text)
```
Its possible that the response text has both, the useful wcs header information, and some unneeded solve log information that then gets parsed into the header.

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

Research direction

Start in the astrometryNet monitor_submission function at the fits.Header.fromstring(wcs_response.text) call, and inspect the response text to distinguish WCS header data from solve-log information. Done means returned WCS headers no longer include unrelated solve-log cards such as index paths and job metadata; verify this against a representative solved response.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
python
Domain
api
Issue type
Bug
Difficulty
3/5
Estimated time
1-2 days
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
45/100

Get new issues in your inbox

A short digest of beginner-friendly GitHub issues.