Newsgroups: alt.paranet.ufo,alt.astronomy
From: kymhorsell@gmail.com
Subject: more space telescope movies -- super-resolving shows "lots of stuff"

[uploaded 58 times; last 17/10/2024]

The AIs have been burning the midnight oil the past week to produce
the latest movie from the TESS space telescope dataset.  Several
changes have been tinkered up to produce super-resolved images of
individual stars with a view to imaging an actual "shape" of whatever
seems to be passing between a region of the sky and the telescope as it
orbits between earth and moon every 2 wks.

Superresolution involves taking a "stack" of similar images, applying
tricky algorithms that stretch, move and warp them to line up "landmark 
features" to sub-pixel accuracy (aka the "Bed Of Procrustes" problem -- 
read yr Greek myths!), removing noise and "adding them up" to produce an
image with significantly more resolution than the originals.

In this case the AI's have developed a pipeline that can take e.g. 16
consecutive images of the same star, adjust them all very precisely, and
produce a resultant "super" image that has 9 times as many pixels.

The dataset I'm using at the moment is the TESS "target pixel" data
where each individual downloadable (TP) file has a stream of approx 
10x10 pixel images of an individual star taken approx every min for the
past 3-4 years. (Of course there are big gaps as the telescope moves
around and concentrates on different parts of the sky with its 4 cameras).

The s/w now boosts that up to effectively 40x40 pixels of the star and its
immediate neighborhood (out to ~1/2 arc min), but then also does a 
"sharpening" operation to produce an image that shows the differences from 
the local average of the stream. In this way "bright" parts of the resulting 
image show areas that "for some reason" are a lot different from the average
for that star around that time (e.g. past few hrs).

As a final twiddle the s/w also removes images where not much seems to be 
happening -- because I know how you Gen You-tube are; 5 sec without any 
action and you switch to the nearest cat or porn channel.

Fresh off the new pipeline is the result of the processing on a
randomly-chosen star that TESS is monitoring for planetary transits.

<kym.massbus.org/moviestar.mp4> 
shows a terrific amount of activity "on" the star and nearby. There are a 
series of "bright flashes" that represent radical departures in all parts of 
the image from average.  But the magnitude is an "absolute" value -- i.e. it 
might represent parts of the image got suddenly dark or suddenly brighter.

Even the way the "disk of the star" (but since the star is so small --
a TESS pixel is around 25 arc seconds and the real disk of even a giant 
is likely to be a tiny percent of that -- what appears to be the main 
disk is just the very immed env of the star maybe upto a few arc secs 
away from its centre) flickers and changes is quite interesting. 
Maybe we are seeing actual flares on the star. But it might also 
be variation in dust between there and here. Or it might be something 
totally else.

The aim of the current step in crunching is to search the TESS dataset
for regions that have a high coverage of images and also robustly
correlate with you-know-what activity.

Some regions of the sky look very promising and a growing list of
small regions that both have lots of images to stack up and also
highly correlate with many of the 250 categories of "activity" we're
interested in are starting to show up.

The software is saying there appears to be objects with basic
geometric shapes like [REDACTED] and [REDACTED] and of course black
{REDACTED} are seen zipping across the whole thing all the time.
(Luckily, TESS images -- at least the ones I've seen -- are monochrome
so we don't have the problem of deciding whether the [REDACTED] are
[REDACTED] or bright [REDACTED]).

But we have yet to get a shape image that is good enough to show the
difference between (let me by totally hypothetical here) a cigar, a
sphere or a triangle.

But the numbers are looking good that such things can be extracted from
the noise. We know that flashes in many stars across some regions
80-90% coincide with certain things seen at ground level across the
US either a few days later (code for "coming") or a few days earlier
(code for "going").

--
"Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood.
Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less."
- Marie Curie

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