Desaturating EUV observations of solar flaring storms
This addresses a big data issue in solar astronomy for researchers analyzing flaring events, though it is incremental as it builds on existing instrumentation challenges.
The paper tackles the problem of image saturation in EUV observations from the AIA/SDO instrument, which affects around 10^$ frames annually, by introducing a novel desaturation method that recovers signal in saturated regions using only the image's own information, resulting in unprecedented statistical reliability for desaturated images.
Image saturation has been an issue for several instruments in solar astronomy, mainly at EUV wavelengths. However, with the launch of the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA) as part of the payload of the Solar Dynamic Observatory (SDO) image saturation has become a big data issue, involving around 10^$ frames of the impressive dataset this beautiful telescope has been providing every year since February 2010. This paper introduces a novel desaturation method, which is able to recover the signal in the saturated region of any AIA image by exploiting no other information but the one contained in the image itself. This peculiar methodological property, jointly with the unprecedented statistical reliability of the desaturated images, could make this algorithm the perfect tool for the realization of a reconstruction pipeline for AIA data, able to work properly even in the case of long-lasting, very energetic flaring events.