A general method of the automatical selection of guide star

The selection of guide stars for making up an onboard star catalog is an essential part of an autonomous star field identification algorithm. In order to realize the automatic selection of guide stars, the guide star density is predicted, based on the probability distribution of observed stars. Then an equal area mapping method is used, in which all candidate stars are projected from the unit sphere to a rectangle and divided with orthogonal grids of equal areas, so that the redundant stars can be properly eliminated. The experiments demonstrate that using our method not only the selected guide star density can be easily satisfied, but also the distribution of guide stars on the sphere is largely unformized