public almost never sees what raw images look like
RAW https://blog.galaxyzoo.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/spiral...
FINAL https://blog.galaxyzoo.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/spiral...
* https://blog.galaxyzoo.org/2010/04/12/how-to-handle-hubble-i...
they also slowly destroy the sensors since they are physical particles moving at almost the speed of light
"This built upon the work of earlier researchers such as Antoine Henri Becquerel, who discovered radioactivity whilst working on the phosphorescence of uranium salts in 1896. Previously, scintillation events had to be laboriously detected by eye, using a spinthariscope (a simple microscope) to observe light flashes in the scintillator."
So this just happened somewhere between arrival to and departure from the zone.
The optics would just be a slight attenuation much like the rest of the camera housing, film reel, operator, etc. So really a summation of all the exposure types you can imagine.
Sheesh, but DuckDuckGo and Google are quite useless. I just tried to see if The Internet has a record of the heli that flew to Chernobyl to shoot that first footage of the blown reactor (IIRC from Moscow, although that does not seems a plausible flying distance), and the search engines think I want to instead find out about the heli that crashed after hitting a crane...
do you happen to know how exactly those artifacts are cleaned up?
They take two pictures, each taking up half the total observation period. If you subtract the two images, the deltas should be the cosmic ray flashes. You can then subtract those out. They use two pictures as opposed to more to minimize the impact of readout noise.
To deal with "stuck pixel" type errors, they can slightly shift the camera between the two observations. They can counter act the shift before doing the initial subtraction.
If you are like me you will find it super interesting. There is immense variety based upon what kind of telescope, what do you want to capture, whether it's for science or astrophotography (aesthetics).
If you are into math side of things you can begin with Richardson-Lucy as a starting point and stacking.
:-)
Don't try to correlate with the sun spots, correlate with the solar wind/cmes from the spots getting out far enough to effectively scatter the incoming cosmic rays away.
Watch this occasionally for a few months and you'll get the idea, although solar activity is slowing down somewhat (as expected).
https://www.spaceweather.gov/products/wsa-enlil-solar-wind-p...
There may be another variable they’re trying to pin down.