This photo of 3i Atlas has gotten quite popular on social media the past few days, clickbait accounts are claiming that this proves that 3i Atlas is not a comet - some claim this is a spaceship, or it is an angel, or it is a cross.
It is none of these things!
Here is the photo in question
This photo was taken with a telescope that magnified to 4000x… basically it has turned the image into one big artifact. It’s magnified and processed so much that it doesn’t show anything close to reality.
At such high magnification levels, the telescopes power hits physical limits due to diffraction, meaning the finest details gets blurred and replaced by diffraction patterns rather than clear features. At 4000x the image is HEAVILY degraded and not a true sharp view.
And then the processing of images at such extreme scale often adds artifacts such as pixelation, noise and compression distortions that aren’t actually present in the original scene.
NASA has the best photos of 3i Atlas, you cam view them here
https://science.nasa.gov/solar-system/comets/3i-atlas/comet-3i-atlas-image-gallery/
