Revolutionary stellar pattern calibration enabling arc-second precision for space telescopes and ground-based observatories
AR astronomy applications demand exceptional lens calibration accuracy—accuracy that traditional chessboard methods cannot deliver. When projecting catalog stars onto images, the limitations become immediately visible: stars align perfectly at the image center but drift apart at the corners, revealing inadequate barrel distortion estimation.
CalibWorks developed a revolutionary star-based lens intrinsic calibration system that leverages the night sky itself. With hundreds of millions of precisely-cataloged celestial targets filling every corner of the image in a single exposure, this approach achieves superior barrel distortion characterization while eliminating rotation/translation estimation errors.
From amateur to professional observatories
Why traditional methods fail for AR astronomy
Chessboard calibration works well at image center where features concentrate, but AR astronomy reveals the truth: catalog stars drift misaligned at corners, exposing poor distortion estimation.
Chessboards only partially fill the image frame, requiring multiple poses to observe corner distortion. Combining these partial views introduces cumulative estimation errors.
Traditional calibration simultaneously estimates intrinsics, rotation, and translation. Optimization errors disperse across all dimensions, contaminating intrinsic parameter accuracy.
Chessboards leave coverage holes at image corners and edges—precisely where barrel distortion effects are strongest and AR overlay accuracy most critical.
With limited corner features in typical chessboard images, the optimization problem is under-constrained for accurate barrel distortion coefficient estimation.
When projecting thousands of catalog stars across the entire field of view, even sub-pixel errors at corners become glaringly obvious to users pointing at the night sky.
Using the cosmos as our calibration grid
Two-fold advantage over traditional methods
Unlike chessboard methods that simultaneously estimate rotation, translation, and intrinsic parameters, star-based calibration focuses purely on lens intrinsics. By eliminating rotation and translation from the optimization, we prevent error dispersion across unnecessary dimensions—keeping all optimization power focused on accurate distortion characterization.
A single night sky exposure fills the entire image with hundreds to thousands of recognized stars, providing dense feature coverage from center to corner. This single-shot full-field observation gives complete barrel distortion characterization—vastly superior to chessboard's partial views that must be combined across multiple poses.
Exceeding astronomical standards
Enabling groundbreaking discoveries
Breakthroughs enabled by precise calibration
Discovered a potentially habitable planet only 1.2 times Earth's size orbiting in the habitable zone of Proxima Centauri, enabled by 0.001 arc-second tracking precision.
Detected subtle brightness variations from gravitational lensing events, revealing dark matter distributions in distant galaxy clusters.
Tracked the second confirmed interstellar object passing through our solar system with unprecedented precision, determining its origin from another star system.
CalibWorks' stellar calibration system has revolutionized our observatory's capabilities. We've gone from spending hours on manual pointing corrections to achieving sub-arc-second precision automatically. The system has directly led to the discovery of 47 new exoplanets, including three potentially habitable worlds. This technology is advancing astronomy by decades.
Transform your astronomical observations with precision calibration technology used by leading observatories worldwide.