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PinPoint Astrometric Engine 7.0 (32- and 64-bit)
With All-Sky Plate Solving and ATLAS Catalog

Welcome to the web site for the PinPoint Astrometric Engine, a programmable engine that provides sensitive, robust, high-speed research-grade astrometric image processing for FITS files from any camera. A set of point-and-click tools (Visual PinPoint) for fast mass plate solving and survey-level asteroid and supernova hunting are included. Both 32- and 64-bit engines are available.

New with Version 7 is support for the ATLAS All-Sky Stellar Reference Catalog. This large, including Gaia stars and PanSTARRS/APASS magnitudes, has high quality magnitudes, it goes deep, and has proper motions. If you can afford the space, this is now the best catalog for all uses. It is 70Gb for coverage down to magnitude 18 and 160 Gb for coverage down to magnitude 20.

PinPoint 7 also has built-in all-sky plate solving, eliminating the requirement for approximate image centerpoint coordinates and plate scale at the cost of additional time. An internet connection is usually employed for this (see below). PinPoint automatically uses the cloud solving service of Astrometry.Net to find its initial solution, then it takes that as the starting point for a full PinPoint solution including distortion mapping. If you don't have an internet cdonnection, PinPoint can use the 'ansvr' local all-sky server by Andy Galasso. This is all automatic to you and to client programs that embed the engine.

Typical uses include plate solving which gives precise pointing to telescope mounts, asteroid and comet searching, high-precision astrometry (detection and measurement of positions), and other more exotic uses such as space situational awareness. The package comes with Visual PinPoint, a point-and-click Windows program that has automated tools for hands-off asteroid and supernova hunting with optional blinking for validation. You can use Visual PinPoint with any FITS or POSS/DSS images.

PinPoint is used as the plate solving engine in many astronomy applications out there, including Diffraction Limited's MaxIm DL 6 and MaxPoint, CCDWare's FocusMax and PoleAlignMax, MainSequence's Sequence Generator Pro, Omega Labs Ricerca 7, CCDWare's CCD Autopilot, and of course our own ACP Expert Observatory Operating System.

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