Imagine you have a non-descript photograph of a star field and you want to identify every light source in the image: including stars, multiple stars, novae, asteroids, comets, galaxies and other deep sky objects. That is exactly what a new program called UniMap can do! The program performs this little piece of magic by first scanning the photograph for all detectable light sources, then attempting to cross-match the pattern of light sources against existing source catalogues. You can significantly improve the performance of the identification algorithms by providing hints about what is in the photograph, for example, a constellation, star, deep-sky object and the field of view. I should mention that the program is not quite production-ready, but the developer, Larry Lart, has made a “pre-alpha” release available to the general public for testing. I spent some time testing UniMap on a random wide field photograph of the sky I had taken years ago and the program worked quite well. It represents a very impressive demonstration of what can be done with public access to astronomical catalogs (and a talent for software development!)
