NPOI Stands for Navy Prototype Optical Interferometer. An optical interferometer is an array of small mirrors that behave much like a telescope. The reason for making many small mirrors instead of a single large mirror is that it becomes increasingly difficult and expensive to make larger and larger mirrors.

This array of mirrors makes it possible to achieve very high resolutions, which is crucial. But, all these mirrors need to be precicely aligned to achieve such resolutions. This alignment is currently being done by hand, which is a painstaking and error-prone process. This alignment must be performed frequently, so overall, this process is very time consuming.

Our solution will use sophisticated image capture and processing software to automate the process of quantifying alignment and aligning of the mirrors. Our software will interface with a camera mounted on an alignment telescope. The solution will process the image to generate the error (in millimeters) for the user. Below is a list of major requirements of the solution.

• Automatically find alignment error in pixels.
• Quantify the alignment error by converting to millimeters using a plate scale.
• Export alignment error data to a spreadsheet compatible file format (.csv) to analyze.