an *extemely* interesting pilot coordinated between Flickr APIs
and an amateur astronomy group, discussed at ReadWriteWeb:

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/using_flickr_for_astronomy.php

"Flickr hosts a wide range of beautiful images, but a new
project built on top of Flickr's API only focuses on photos of
the night sky from amateur astronomers. The Astrometry.net
project constantly scans the Astrometry Flickr group for new
images to catalog and to add to its open-source sky survey. At
the same time, this project also provides a more direct
service to the amateur astronomers, as it also analyzes each
image and returns a high-quality description of the photo's
contents.

"The Astrometry group currently has over 400 members, and as
Christoper Stumm, a member of the Astrometry.net team, told
the Flickr Code blog, the back-end software uses geometric
hashing to exactly pinpoint and describe the objects in the
images. When you submit an image to the Flickr pool, the robot
will not just respond with a comment that contains an exact
description of what you see in the image, but it will also
annotate the image automatically.

"While a lot of members of the Astrometry group use high-end
telescopes and cameras, the Astrometry.net solver can also
analyze images from consumer-level digital cameras.

"While just being able to automatically analyze and catalog
these images is pretty cool already, every description also
contains a link that displays the image in Microsoft's
WordWide Telescope. "