Great news and interesting write up Mat, why make a single discovery
... when you can make bloody nine!
Well done to the team
...and as an extra bonus, you have produced a unique, quite beautiful, not to mention deep, image of an an otherwise rarely shot bit of sky. Now you need to team up with the other ultra deep Kiwi guru, Rolf Olsen, one can only imagine what the pair of you might discover together
Slightly off topic but still relevant?...Your processing note is interesting too. In this new age of AI sharpening software/plugins, it seems to matter which software/plugin you actually use and the technique applied. While in this case your discovery is not about the fine details revealed anyway but rather the existence of the whole object and I am not an expert but in relation to many other images, enhancing fine details, based on learning what astronomical detail looks like in lots of other images, seems fraught with issues...
eg. what if the neural networks learn from lots of poorly enhanced details in some/many of those images?
Mike