Hacker News Reader

What causes the dark radial stripes? Blocked by something in the sky? Downtime?

I know Elite Dangerous has similar artifacts showing small radial areas of the galaxy that our telescopes have surveyed (but it's lines of stars rather than lines of darkness)

View on HN

My best guess is that those are near very bright foreground stars, which cause artifacts in the corresponding imaging survey. DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys is used to pre-select targets for spectroscopic observations. If you go to legacysurvey.org/viewer you can see some of the bright stars and the kinds of issues they can cause.

Things in the way. I'd guess it's opaque dust clouds in our galaxy. Could also be bright stars (as jwuphysics suggested).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com