| A Pixon reconstruction of broad-band imagery of the Crab nebula taken by NASA's Chandra satellite. Because the Crab is so bright, it was necessary to image it through the ACIS spectrometer at zeroth order. Consequently the sharp narrow rays coming out of the crab are spectra of the bright central object (small black circle in center of image where the data is over-exposed) in the orders n=-1 and n=1. The Crab image is dominated by noise due to Poisson photon counting statistics. The reconstruction improves the resolution and fits an optimal minimal complexity model to the structure of the Crab's emission, thereby avoiding the "eye-fooling" signal dependent noise in the data and revealing a wealth of fine spatial structure. |
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