I have friends/former colleagues who work on these pipelines, and I can tell you that it's not a stretch to say that there are dozens if not hundreds of people whose entire working lives are about characterizing the sensors, noise, electronics, so that after images are taken, they can be processed well / automatically / with high precision.
(and after all, if these instruments/telescope were 30 years and $10B in the works, you would hope there's a fairly well developed function to make the data as useful as it can be)
The goal is to get the "true" physical measurement of the light that arrives at the telescope. After those photons arrive, the measurements get contaminated by everything to do with the hardware, sensors, electronics, processing artifacts, and there's a whole organization that exists to study and remove these effects to get that true signal out.
Every filter, sensor, system has been studied for thousands of person-hours and there are libraries on libraries of files to calibrate/correct the image that gets taken. How do you add up exposures that are shifted by sub-pixel movements to effectively increase the resolution of the image? How to identify when certain periodic things happen to the telescope and add patterns of noise that you want to remove? What is the pattern that a single point of light should expect to be spread out into after traveling through the mirror/telescope/instrument/sensor system, and how do you use that to improve the image quality? (the 6 pointed star you see)
Most fascinating to me is when someone discovers or imagines that some natural phenomenon that you thought was a discovery, turns out to be a really subtle effect of the noise in the instrument? (ADC readout noise / spike that subtly correlates with a high value having passed by during readout of a previous pixel? which makes your supernova discovery actually a fluke?
I'm trying to recall the paper discovering that the pixel value on one chip of an instrument was related to the bitwise encoding of the readout on a neighboring chip's pixel...)
Then there's even a whole industry of how to archive data, make it useful to the field, across telescopes, across projects, and over time.
It's an art of its own where you need to account for absolutely everything. Like does the 0.1C fluctuation on your sensor is actual change or just the noise of the sensor flipping the last bit or two of the ADC ? Hell, in right conditions you can use that noise to extract extra resolution over time.
Or how vibration on a cable can induce sensor noise because you have 2 conductors in a long line creating capacitor with capacity modulated by vibration and because of that change of capacitance there is a current induced in it.
Or how every sensor is a temperature sensor and anything else it senses is just extra.
Once bytedance put their filters on, they'll be a so much more sexy!
More seriously, I think so many people are only familiar with using image processing techniques to make things look subjectively "better", that they find it harder to believe that scientists don't do the same things to their research images. That is a bit corrosive to society, but real today.
Most fascinating to me is when someone discovers or imagines that some natural phenomenon that you thought was a discovery, turns out to be a really subtle effect of the noise in the instrument?
This happens a lot in radio astronomy, too - you can get interference from all sorts of electronic devices. Nowadays there are more and more passing satellites, as well. Or even something mundane like a microwave.
(and after all, if these instruments/telescope were 30 years and $10B in the works, you would hope there's a fairly well developed function to make the data as useful as it can be)
The goal is to get the "true" physical measurement of the light that arrives at the telescope. After those photons arrive, the measurements get contaminated by everything to do with the hardware, sensors, electronics, processing artifacts, and there's a whole organization that exists to study and remove these effects to get that true signal out.
Every filter, sensor, system has been studied for thousands of person-hours and there are libraries on libraries of files to calibrate/correct the image that gets taken. How do you add up exposures that are shifted by sub-pixel movements to effectively increase the resolution of the image? How to identify when certain periodic things happen to the telescope and add patterns of noise that you want to remove? What is the pattern that a single point of light should expect to be spread out into after traveling through the mirror/telescope/instrument/sensor system, and how do you use that to improve the image quality? (the 6 pointed star you see)
Most fascinating to me is when someone discovers or imagines that some natural phenomenon that you thought was a discovery, turns out to be a really subtle effect of the noise in the instrument? (ADC readout noise / spike that subtly correlates with a high value having passed by during readout of a previous pixel? which makes your supernova discovery actually a fluke? I'm trying to recall the paper discovering that the pixel value on one chip of an instrument was related to the bitwise encoding of the readout on a neighboring chip's pixel...)
Then there's even a whole industry of how to archive data, make it useful to the field, across telescopes, across projects, and over time.
Lots of science and work here over decades.