METHOD OF DETERMINING ORIENTATION BY IMAGES OF STARRY SKY SECTIONS Russian patent published in 2017 - IPC G01C21/02 G01C21/24 

FIELD: physics.

SUBSTANCE: method of determining the orientation by the images of the starry sky sections is that the on-board catalogue of star coordinates is previously accounted and remembered, limiting the choice of stars of stellar magnitude displayed by the monitoring system. Then, in the process of determining the orientation, an image of the starry sky section is formed, the brightest star is selected in the central part of the view field, and the stars next to it are chosen. Next, pairwise distances in the image from the selected central star to the selected neighbouring stars are determined, and then the distances measured between the stars measured with the distance obtained from the on-board catalogue are compared. When all these distances coincide, the selected central star is identified on the image with the corresponding star from the catalogue and the orientation is determined, taking into account the position of this star in the image in the instrumental coordinate system. While every star in the preparation of the on-board catalogue further characterize the values of the distances to two neighbouring stars and the distance between these stars, or up to three neighbouring stars, and the results of these definitions form a three-dimensional feature space. In the process of determining the orientation for the star selected on the image, the position of this star is determined in the feature space by these measured intervals, and then the position and orientation of the device in the starry sky are determined by its catalogue coordinates.

EFFECT: increasing the efficiency of the sensors used in the stellar orientation.

3 cl, 1 dwg