The script uses other Starlink software tools. Although the use of these tools should be transparent, it might be of use to have some indication of sources of further detail. All of these tools should be up-to-date if you are using a Starlink Summer 2003 distribution or later.
The script is largely a wrapper for ASTROM. This is
documented fully in SUN/5.
The pattern matching facilities which the script depends on
come from the findoff application within CCDPACK. There are
further details in SUN/139. You need version
4.0-1 at least, and the program does, of course, respect any
setting of the environment variable
CCDPACK_DIR).
The WCS information is largely handled by ATOOLS. This does
not have a SUN yet. You need ATOOLS 1.3 or better
(ATOOLS_DIR).
autoastrom requires AST 1.8-1 or better to build. Depending
on precisely which earlier version of AST you have, the moggy
tool will fail to compile, or if it compiles, fail to link.
If you have AST installed in a non-standard place, you should
use the STARLINKS environment variable at build
time (see Section 3), to tell the build script where
to find it.
It also needs StarPerl (see SUN/228).
The concepts underlying WCS, and its interaction with FITS-WCS, are described in the AST documentation. See SUN/211.
Extraction of the object catalogues from the CCD is done by Extractor, which is the Starlink version of Emmanuel Bertin's SExtractor. Extractor is documented in SUN/226. See also the SExtractor manual mud165, the home of SExtractor on the web [sextractor-web], the distribution location [sextractor-ftp] and the original SExtractor article [sextractor-article].
If you need to supply the initial astrometry which this
script requires, you can do that using GAIA. This is documented
in SUN/214, but it's very easy to use, and you
might be best to simply start it up (give the command gaia
image_name, presuming you have already done the
initialisation to use Starlink software) and experiment.