Unknown Device Galaxy Map Analysis

Method:

Take two videos using camera suite. One from floor facing upwards and one from Unknown Device centre facing outwards. Manually crop each to one full rotation and sync start frame. Crop frames to small band in the shared X-axis. More videos could be taken and stitched together to collect a larger section of the map.

Process levels in frame to remove most unnecessary detail (we only care about pixels that are the colours shown in the map). Use AsPyLib to detect XY coords of each star in the frame.

Process data to detect new stars coming into each frame – build up two databases of every star (XY position for the outward image, XZ for the upwards image). Where not ambiguous assign a star an XYZ value, where ambiguous use relative velocity to provide relative Z depth. Discard any stars that remain ambiguous.

Use the pixel colour to classify yellow or white.

Limitations:

• Due to framing and obstructions, there are many missing stars near the centre of the Unknown Device and some missing that are far from the centre.
• Many stars are so close together that it’s hard to distinguish between them – this is especially the case near the centre of the galaxy.

Using a polynomial (3) best fit on a scatter graph of occurrences by distance from galactic centre, we can estimate that we have rough positions and classifications for around 50% of the total mapped stars.

Results:

A WebGL representation of the detected stars can be found at: https://ixalon.github.io/elitedangerous/unknown-device-galaxy/

Classified ~28,500 stars

• White: ~14,100
• Yellow: ~14,400

Extrapolated total: ~57,000 stars

• White: ~28,200
• Yellow: ~28,800

Conclusion:

If the number of yellow or white stars in the map signify the extent of a Thargoid/Unknown presence, and they prove to be a threat - we're fucked.