The visible structure is dominated by a sparse photographic ladder and extensive writing. A useful next analysis is exposure morphology and historical metadata rather than a speculative sky warp.
The apparent Vega label, date 5 August 1918 and focus settings accompany a structured rosette of repeated images. Those marks are compatible with deliberate focus variation. A source detector cannot safely treat the rosette points as unrelated catalog stars. Stellar identity, focal settings and exposure order still need a logbook or a recognizable background field.
A small number of repeated target-like images lie among labels. They may encode an exposure or calibration sequence, but the sequence meaning is not yet established.
The transformed margin appears to include “UV1753”, “1918 Aug. 5”, “Vega” and “Focus”, with values near 22.08 and 42.02. These are visual readings, not an independent identification of the photographic target. The physical units and relation to the repeated images still need a logbook check.
The revised layer uses local contrast in both polarities, expanded inspected writing regions and contextual recovery of short fragments and round digits. Known photographic targets and sampled spectral apertures are protected. It is not OCR and does not reconstruct hidden sky or invent pen strokes.
The selection covers 6.08% of this scan (1,796,362 pixels). Faint marks, scratches and contacts between ink and photographic images remain ambiguous. The cyan overlay shows the wider exclusion footprint used by the photographic remainder; the stroke mask is supplied separately.
The writing PNG is a white, contrast-rendered stencil of bright and dark observed marks. The observed-pixel PNG preserves their stretched scan appearance. Both use original scan coordinates. The photographic remainder displays excluded pixels as black holes. It is neither a clean-sky reconstruction nor a new photometric product. Keep the mask alongside any measurements. Native original-intensity TIFF/FITS products, where generated, remain in the analysis workspace and are not duplicated in this handoff.
This revision recovers short letter fragments, round digits and inspected dark marks, with broader writing regions. The stroke selection grows from 597,849 to 1,796,362 pixels (3.00×). The photographic remainder uses a separate 3-pixel exclusion margin, covering 17.33% of the scan.
The wider selection deliberately favors removing writing. Nearby stars, scratches and ambiguous fragments can also be excluded. Explicit photographic protection regions retain known target images and sampled spectra; this does not establish perfect separation elsewhere.
No confirmed astrometric solution was recovered. The available evidence does not support a field center, angular scale or reliable telescope assignment.
The apparent Vega label, date 5 August 1918 and focus settings accompany a structured rosette of repeated images. Those marks are compatible with deliberate focus variation. A source detector cannot safely treat the rosette points as unrelated catalog stars. Stellar identity, focal settings and exposure order still need a logbook or a recognizable background field.
Across these scans, repeated photographic images need not imply the same mechanism. Shutter timing, guiding offsets, objective optics and different pointings can leave related patterns. Establish consistent component membership before fitting a smooth warp. No result here isolates glass deformation from telescope optics, emulsion, scanner geometry and centroid bias.
A distortion fit requires many independent reference positions spread across the plate. The sparse ladder supplies neither that spatial coverage nor a catalog association. Photographic size, intensity and repetition could still be measured in scan coordinates.
Only scan-coordinate annotation products are provided. No celestial WCS, catalog comparison or geometric correction has been fabricated for the empty parts of the field.
Select a numbered pin or a note. Locations are editorial review pointers, not measured confidence contours; plate-wide limitations also apply.
The identity of the target and relation between exposures remain open. Multiple marks may represent repeated measurements of one object.
Written notes may encode durations or planning instructions; a logbook or careful transcription would be more informative than an unconstrained blind solve.
The scan has insufficient confirmed reference geometry for a spatial distortion field.
Check the tentative Vega/focus reading against the plate log, then measure each photographic profile consistently and compare image width with the recorded settings. Keep saturation, physical focus units and unknown scanner response explicit.
An unresolved sky identification does not make the specimen uninformative. It is a plausible calibration sequence whose quantitative interpretation needs metadata.
All scientific numbers are snapshots of the saved analysis products. The original 16-bit scans remain the measurement source. JPEG derivatives, contrast stretching and masked previews are inspection tools; do not derive photographic density or absolute response from their appearance.
