rlancaste wrote: In reference to your our discussion about taking results from sextractor into ASTAP,

So the output of sextractor is just a binary fits table (It can also do ASCII, but astrometry.net didn't want to read those files). The column headings are very specific just to let you know. For example, the X position of a star has the heading X_IMAGE. And likewise for the other headings that I mentioned to you before.

I can certainly combine the data returned by sextractor with the data currently in the image buffer and save that as a FITS file with the appropriate FITS headers as you mentioned. But that would mean that a user would have to use my program in order to produce a file acceptable for ASTAP, since this would be a brand new format basically.

Part of the appeal of reading in an XYLS file and the options the way it works in astrometry.net would be the flexibility. A user could use sextractor, SEP, or maybe even astrometry.net to get the star info from an image. Then they could send that information directly to ASTAP to solve. They wouldn't need my program to do this because the format would already be compatible.

Obviously, ultimately, whichever way you want to accept the information into ASTAP would be fine with me, since I'm just making an interface for all these solvers and I've already had to make a number of adaptations to accommodate the differences between them. I definitely do understand the appeal of having the image data come along with the table of information. So, I can do it your way if you like.