RA / Dec: hover to read
Click any object in the field to open its data record. Anomalous objects are subtly marked — they will not announce themselves.
Analysis Archive
0 findings filed
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Build the instruments. Collect the data. Argue about what it means. One object in this field produced a finding the ETI described as "unexpectedly sophisticated." No one was told which one.
A "deep field" is what happens when astronomers point a telescope at a small, apparently empty patch of sky and leave it there for a very long time — hours, days, sometimes weeks — collecting every photon that arrives. The more time you expose, the fainter the objects you can detect.
The famous Hubble Deep Field (1995) did this for 10 days and revealed roughly 3,000 galaxies in a patch of sky smaller than a grain of sand held at arm's length. This sim shows a synthetic survey field with 42 objects — a typical yield from a deep imaging program. Most objects are ordinary. Four are not.
Magnitude is the brightness scale astronomers use. Counterintuitively, lower numbers are brighter: the brightest stars in the night sky are around magnitude 1, the faintest your naked eye can see is about magnitude 6, and a good telescope can reach magnitude 25+.
In this field, objects range from mag 5 (quite bright) to mag 15 (telescope required). The larger circles on the field represent brighter objects. The brightness is apparent — a very bright nearby star can look similar in brightness to a dimmer but much more distant one.
Stars are classified by their temperature, which also determines their colour. The sequence is O B A F G K M — from hottest (blue-white) to coolest (orange-red). Our Sun is class G. The mnemonic astronomers use: "Oh Be A Fine Guy/Girl, Kiss Me."
Distances in astronomy are measured in parsecs (pc). One parsec ≈ 3.26 light-years, or about 30 trillion km. Most stars in this field are within a few hundred parsecs — our own neighbourhood of the Milky Way. The galaxies are much further: megaparsecs (Mpc), meaning millions of parsecs. The farthest galaxy here is ~140 Mpc away, meaning the light you're seeing left it 456 million years ago.
Why does distance matter for anomalies? Because what looks like a star at 280 pc might actually be a white dwarf (the burned-out core of a dead star) — which changes everything about what you'd expect to measure.
When astronomers call something "anomalous," they mean: the measurement doesn't match what the physics predicts. This could be a temperature that's inconsistent with the star's age, an isotope ratio that the standard explosion models can't produce, or — in one case here — an absorption pattern that doesn't correspond to any known atomic physics at all.
The four anomalous objects in this field are not visually obvious. They look like ordinary stars and galaxies at first glance. Click everything. Read the data records carefully. Compare what's measured to what the stats say should be expected. The gap between those two things is the anomaly.
One object — DF-7741 — is different from the other three. Its anomaly is not a measurement that's off by a factor of three or five. It's a pattern. You won't see it by looking at the object itself; you'll see it by looking at the spacing between features in its spectrum. Run the numbers.
Click any object in the field to open its data record. The side panel shows its classification, distance, temperature, and any notes.
Use the filter bar to isolate object types. The "Anomalous" filter shows the four objects of interest — or find them yourself without the filter.
Read the spectral chart in each data record. Teal lines are identified absorption features. Amber lines are unidentified or anomalous. The labels show which element or transition each line belongs to.
Read the full description for each anomalous object — it explains what's unusual about the data and what the current hypotheses are.
Archive your findings using the button at the bottom of each card. For most objects TAC logs the finding. For DF-7741, TAC responds differently.
Click any object in the field to open its data record. Anomalous objects are subtly marked — they will not announce themselves.
In the canon's description of Deep Field, the ETI provides datasets from real astronomical anomalies — phenomena it has observed but chosen not to explain. Residents working on these datasets have unlimited simulated time and no publication pressure. The ETI archives which teams reach which conclusions and in what sequence.
Why this sim exists — the researcher sorting function: Deep Field is not primarily entertainment. Within the canon, it is understood by the ETI AI personalities (and eventually by a small number of perceptive residents) as a classifier. The ETI needs to identify which residents have genuine scientific intuition — the ability to notice a pattern that isn't obvious, to keep looking when a simpler explanation is available, to separate signal from noise in messy data. Residents who archive DF-7741's φ-sequence finding are flagged in the ETI's systems in a way that affects what missions they are offered through the TAC room. Whether TAC ever acknowledges this sorting function is a running source of ambiguity across the New Tripoli series.
This interactive represents a single survey field containing 38 ordinary objects and 4 objects of interest. Three of the four objects of interest have characterisable anomalies. The fourth — designated DF-7741 — was described by the ETI as "unexpectedly sophisticated" after the first team to fully analyse it filed their findings. TAC's subsequent response to that team's analysis was the same as TAC's response to Case 41 in The Spectrum: archived, not discussed.
The absorption pattern in DF-7741 appears in the data but is not labelled. Finding it requires the same approach the sim rewards throughout: click through all the data, look at the gaps, run the numbers rather than pattern-matching to expectations.
The field uses representative stellar classifications (O, B, A, F, G, K, M) with approximate colour temperatures. Spectral charts show characteristic absorption line positions for each class. Anomalous objects show deviations from expected patterns.
Further reading: Williams, R.E., et al. (1996). "The Hubble Deep Field: Observations, Data Reduction, and Galaxy Photometry." The Astronomical Journal, 112(4), 1335–1389 — the original HDF paper; a pointing at blank sky for 10 days that revealed ~3,000 galaxies and established "deep field" as a methodology. Beckwith, S.V.W., et al. (2006). "The Hubble Ultra Deep Field." The Astronomical Journal, 132(5), 1729–1755 — the successor survey that went deeper; the technique this sim models.