STTR Phase I:Development of an Artifical Star Stimulation and Modeling Tool for Astronomy with Science and Teaching Applications

这项小型企业技术转移第一阶段研究项目的目标是建立和验证用于研究天文物体的人工恒星模拟应用程序，并评估其对专业和认真的业余天文学家社区的商业潜力。现代光探测器的普及，由于其突出的特性，迎来了天文学的黄金时代。然而，它们的高保真特性并不有助于在拥挤的场地中分离混合在一起的物体图像。虽然已经开发出强大的技术来解决这个问题，但它们使用起来很麻烦，需要大量的人力和计算工作。我们需要的是一个优化的自动化软件包，它可以被天文社区日常使用。这一建议的重点是进一步发展先进的人造恒星测试，并使由此产生的一套工具可供更广泛的社区使用。除了建模和仿真工作外，该公司还将收集和分析验证数据，并开发图形用户界面，以提高软件的可用性。在此项目期间开发的软件将主要由公共领域和/或开源科学例程组成，具有专有的图形用户界面。该公司将评估为日益成熟的业余天文团体制作培训材料的经济机会。将强大的工具交到接近专业的业余天文学家手中，将进一步提高他们对科学贡献的价值。还可以开发其他相关的软件产品，以教育和指导已经在其家庭和俱乐部天文台中使用高质量数字CCD相机的业余天文学家。该公司还在研究将这些技术用于卫星图像分析的机会，以用于商业和军事用途的地面数据。随着商业卫星成像扩展到每年数十亿美元的产业，先进的分析工具变得越来越有价值。同样，军方对光学和高光谱图像的日益依赖表明，分析接近其分辨率极限的图像的能力仍将是一项基本的战略和战术要求。本工作的部分内容可能适用于这些情报、监视和侦察（ISR）活动

This Small Business Technology Transfer Phase I research project's objectives are to build and validate an artificial star simulation application for the study of astronomical objects, and to assess its commercial potential for the professional and serious amateur astronomer communities. The prevalence of modern light detectors has ushered in a golden age for astronomy due to their outstanding characteristics. However, their high-fidelity nature does not help in disentangling the images of objects blended together in crowded fields. While powerful techniques have been developed to solve this problem, they are cumbersome to use, requiring substantial human and computational effort. What is needed is an optimized automated software package that can be routinely used by the astronomical community. This proposal focuses on furthering the development of advanced artificial star tests, and making the resulting suite of tools available to the wider community. In addition to this modeling and simulation work the company will collect and analyze validation data and develop a graphical user interface to increase the usability of the software.The software developed during this project will be comprised of largely public domain and/or open source scientific routines with a proprietary graphical user interface. The company will assess the economic opportunities for producing training materials for the increasingly sophisticated amateur astronomical community. Placing powerful tools in the hands of near-professional amateur astronomers will further raise the value of their contributions to science. Additional related software products may also be developed to both educate and guide amateur astronomers who already use high quality digital CCD cameras in their home and club observatories. The company is also investigating opportunities for using these techniques in satellite imagery analysis for both commercial and military applications to terrestrial data. As commercial satellite imaging expands to a multibillion dollar per year industry, advanced analysis tools become increasingly valuable. Likewise, the military's increasing dependence upon optical and hyper-spectral imagery suggests that the ability to analyze images near their resolution limit will remain an essential strategic and tactical requirement. Portions of this work may be applicable to these Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) activities