Expected spatial distribution of plate and digitization artifacts

Characterize the expected spatial distribution of photographic plate artifacts and digitization artifacts on POSS1-E plates to enable appropriate null modeling for analyses such as Earth’s shadow frequency, alignment statistics, and correlation assessments.

Background

The significance of reported deficits or alignments depends critically on the assumed background distribution of detections.

The authors state that they do not know the expected distribution of plate- and digitization-related artifacts, which undermines the use of Poisson assumptions and necessitates empirical characterization of artifact spatial statistics.