Here is the SLAC news article [1] and the zoomable picture of the romanesco [2]. The picture itself is quite underwhelming - certainly an artifact of how it was created using a pinhole but your phone can capture a better picture of a romanesco.

Besides that, where do the different kind of artifacts - interference fringes, dark and bright vertical lines, white specks - come from? Why are the interference fringes distributed pretty randomly? Dust on the sensor despite everyone wearing bunny suits?

[1] https://www6.slac.stanford.edu/news/2020-09-08-sensors-world...

[2] https://www.slac.stanford.edu/~tonyj/osd/public/romanesco.ht...

Fun fact: the guy who made [2] is also the co-author of the first web page hosted in North America.

That explains a lot.

Does anyone else feel like BBC writing has gone into the loo lately? Popular science reporting doesn't need to sound like sixth grade book report filler.

> Who knows? It might even get us closer to understanding those cosmic head-scratchers "dark energy" and "dark matter" which appear to be controlling the evolution of so much of what we see when we look up.

Gah, really?

The man who wrote this has been working for the BBC in this capacity since 1994 at least

is it me, or does the photo of broccoli look decidedly unimpressive in the article!

It was made just to test the camera sensor without any lenses, just a pinhole. That means that the photo blurs relative to the size of the pinhole, which probably wasn't that small.

To me the issue is all of the artifacts in the sensors. Obviously most of the time this is corrected in software but they look pretty rough.

I hoped they're making photos of a broccoli from the orbit...

These are just the first full-focal plane images, there's a lot of parts in the system that are set up for testing _the sensors_ and it's geared towards that.

https://www.lsst.org/content/detailed-features-pinhole-proje...

I bet it looks good at 100%