• TESS panorama images

    From R Kym Horsell@kym@sdf.org to alt.astronomy,alt.ufo.reports on Sat Aug 8 02:33:26 2026
    From Newsgroup: alt.astronomy

    I set up some web pages showing some TESS images a few years back and
    have gotten around to trying to update it to latest images and a few
    (very few) extra twiddles to describe what it is you're seeing.

    The new page may or may not supercede the old page that generally
    showed some "movies" of hour by hour monitoring of super close-ups of
    regions of interest in the much larger full images from the telescope.

    New page:
    <http://kym.massbus.org/TESS/PANORAMA/>

    Each "sector" shows the position of the telescope in the sky along
    with the positions of the 20 brightest stars. At the bottom each ccd
    is laid out in miniature. The ordering is not straightforward and some
    rotation of some ccds within some cameras may still be required to get
    all alignments correct. The numbers inside each FITS ccd image to
    help you do this are "complicated" to boil it down to 1 word.

    (If you're new to TESS is basically is a very wide angle camera
    composed of 16 2kx2k sensors spread across about 25x95 deg of sky. It
    has been wandering around an Earth/Moon orbit since 2017 and is
    trained on regions of interest for days or weeks at a time taking
    snaps every few seconds. Each of the 16 sensors produces an
    astro-format FITS file around 30 MB each containing all the relevant information for that instant. Most of it is online at the STSCI in
    some form or other. The images are processed various places to watch
    out for planetary crossing of each star in the field. Some of this is available as "light curves" for individual stars; and there are
    selected full images for each ccd available online from ~2017 up to
    the present).

    On the site sector 81 (sometime in 2024) is presently the most
    detailed. Sectors 100 and 101 (a few months back) are the latest ones
    I have a full panorama for. As I write this more sectors are coming
    in. (I think the last one started was 105). Quite a bit of disk space
    has been chewed up by all the other random ccd images I've collected
    over the past 9y or so and are not represented here. But I'll get
    around to replicating some of the other sectors that turned out to be interesting.

    I process the indiv ccd images and focus in on the very very dimmest
    features detectable. Other people watch the light from the stars in
    the images; but it's also fun to watch the space around each star and
    the gaps between the stars. There is stuff happening all over. :)
    Basically, if the data is good enough to see planets crossing some dim
    star then you can probably see asteroids and other junk crossing in
    front of 1000s of stars. It also seems there is enough dim light
    coming off general debris and dust to read by. TESS images are 24b of
    B&W. While there is a documented low-level of time-varying random
    noise, you can dig down into the grey levels to reliably see features
    visible just above that level and, over time, filter off some of the instant-by-instant noise and dig down a little into the dirt even.

    So many of the images displayed at this time seem over-exposed. This
    is generally due to the default processing various AI programs have
    determined show interesting things. At other times the same algorithm
    and parameters gives an image a human being can understand, too. :)

    The display will change from time-to-time as I or one of the AI
    programs that monitors this dataset gets around to it. Sober requests
    are welcome.

    --
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