This week, I upgraded the celestial positioning pipeline with ASTAP as the primary plate solver (1–2s vs 10–60s for astrometry.net) with automatic fallback when ASTAP can’t solve. I replaced attitude extraction with direct rotation matrix extraction. I alidated end-to-end by plate-solving a real iPhone star photo and a synthetic FITS image from NASA.
Next week I need to test the full pipeline on the Pi with the existing camera calibration and live IMU/mag data to get an actual lat/lon fix with ground truth comparison.
I am on track. The core math is all implemented and tested, camera calibration is done, and sensor data is validated. The remaining work is Pi integration and accuracy evaluation.