LAUSR

The small-field astrometric point-pattern matching problem is a fundamental problem in astronomy, that although considered a long time ago still lacks a formal definition. It can be textually stated as: given two lists of positions of stars, find the common stars between these lists, taking into account rotation, translation, reflection and scaling operations. It is expected that there might be missing stars between the lists. In this work, we give the astronomical context, review some heuristic methods adopted in the literature, present distance matrix formulations for the problem and propose a new algorithm to solve it.