Why Astrometry.net on MacOS? because Macs are built to take bullets and have long battery life. Unfortunately building almost anything on MacOS is ten times as hard as doing it on Linux. There are some (old) instructions for building Astrometry.net on MacOS here. However they are dated 2012. The instructions for Homebrew work fine on Yosemite with python 2.7:
- grab XCode
- grab XQuartz
- grab Homebrew
- grab pip
- you need to have index files, get them from http://broiler.astrometry.net/~dstn/4100/ (wide-field images) or http://broiler.astrometry.net/~dstn/4200/
- (Homebrew wants them in /usr/local/Cellar/astrometry-net/0.70/data, your mileage will vary depending on the version of Astrometry.net that you have)
- you need to install pyfits (sudo pip install pyfits)