Hello,

During the last six months I have collected high-resolution scans of drawings and photographs of the Crab Nebula, from their original plates or prints, spanning 1844 to 2000, as TIFF images. My main goal is to acquire the best photo from each decade.

I have made a temporary website with low-resolution versions (72 dpi, 400px wide) of these images:

http://davidjarvis.ca/nebula

I would like help rotating and scaling the images. I have tried DeepSkyTracker, IRIS, RegiStax, AstroStack, RegiStar, and AstroArt. I have yet to delve into FreeMat, IRAF (+CL?), ITK (+VTK), or other various APIs to help. (See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image_r...Other_Software)

Essentially what I would like to know is if there is a simple software package that allows the user to select stars in one image, then map them to stars in a second image, followed by having the computer perform a transformation that aligns the two images. The software packages I mentioned do way too much automated star detection which simply does not work with the images I have (i.e., hand-drawn photographs).

Astrophotography software is not a requirement. If there is some software that allows users to select 10 small rectangular areas in one picture that map to 10 small areas in another and have the software do the appropriate transformation (to align the rectangles), that should be fine, too. (The rectangles would just happen to enclose stars.)

Any ideas? (Keep in mind I'm quite new to all this ...)

Thanks in advance!