METHOD FOR DETERMINING ORIENTATION BY IMAGES OF STARRY SKY AREAS Russian patent published in 2021 - IPC G01C21/02 G01C21/24 G09B27/04 

FIELD: astronomy.

SUBSTANCE: invention relates to methods for determining the orientation by the coordinates of the observed stars, mainly for navigation purposes, in particular, for space navigation, by determining the position of the spacecraft relative to the images of stars observed by a stellar orientation device. The essence of the proposed technical solution lies in the fact that when compiling the on-board catalogue of the placement of stars in the feature coordinate space of pairwise distances between stars and when making determinations from the images of the starry sky, the coordinates of the stars in the feature space are represented by the remainders of dividing by the coefficients selected for a decrease for each of the coordinate directions. The remainders from this division form the address of the star in the onboard catalogue, which is used to find the spatial coordinates of the stars in the sky.

EFFECT: present method makes it possible to quickly find the spatial coordinates of the observed stars to determine the orientation without enumerating the data of the onboard catalogue. The introduced transformation of the feature space makes it possible to significantly reduce its volume, as well as the required size of the required memory for its storage. In this case, the number of stars in the onboard catalogue does not change significantly.

1 cl, 2 dwg