Installation

Installing the WWT Aligner is a two-step process.

Prerequisites🔗

The WWT Aligner bundles up the complex Astrometry.Net software system using the Docker “containerization” system. In order to use the WWT Aligner, you must first install Docker.

Install the Frontend🔗

Once you’ve got Docker, you should install the “frontend” component, which is a small program that talks to your Docker installation.

You can download the latest release of the frontend from GitHub by following this link. Each release is published with versions of the frontend compiled for different operating systems.

To install the frontend, download the appropriate archive for your OS and unpack it. For instance, on a Mac you’ll want to download the file with the name looking like wwt-aligner-frontend-<VERSION>-x86_64-apple-darwin.tar.gz. This tarball will unpack to a single file, wwt-aligner.

Put this file in a place where it can be found by your computer’s command-line prompt. On many systems, a reasonable default is the /usr/local/bin directory. You can set this up on the command line with:

$ sudo mv wwt-aligner /usr/local/bin/

You will know that this stage of the installation is successful when you can run the command wwt-aligner from your command line prompt and get some program usage help printed.

Download the Backend🔗

The final step is to download the bundled software in the form of a Docker “image”. The frontend can do this for you. Run:

$ wwt-aligner update

The image is about 500 megabytes in size, so it may take a little while to download. But once that’s done, you are ready to align some images!