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I assume that the scientists are using the raw data directly, the probably aren’t even bothering to convert it to a format that is visible on a monitor. Same way this AI touch up is almost certainly just to give the public something to see

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The point of the Event Horizon Telescope (ETH) was actually to attempt to produce something like an image of the black hole at the center of the galaxy, so in a sense it was a pretty-picture mission. The point of this study was to attempt to link up the observations with models in "picture-space".

There are certainly other, less pretty, ways to looks at the data, but producing something that can be intuitively understood, such as a 2D image, can also be helpful scientifically.

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