I hope that message gets to the reprographics technician - the one that bumped the camera ; just in case there are a series of such pictures that mess up the research!

Seeing it here too on WU X0000079881049200612260024_1. Definitely looks like someone bumped the camera

No, Mr. Bump is not in trouble. It's the WCG staff who like to also enjoy the weekend and who usually poll the scientists who like weekends too, who themselves also monitor the science forums and will be nagged by WCG staff if they don't respond... then they might be busy, so it can take a few days before they get to answering this query/observation.

That's how it works.

edit: esoteric17, thanks for the sample image... tells a thousand words :D

Thank you for pointing out that unusual work unit.

Batches of these images do come through from time to time -- generally not caused by a physical bump to the camera system (it is mounted on a 2-axis robot, and very stable), but from a positioning error made by a technician when the plates were set up for automatic imaging. The work unit you have specifically highlighted was from an older batch that predates the automatic camera positioning system that is now integrated into the system. (By the way, the automatic positioning system was derived from the image analysis work being performed on the Grid.)

The good news is that the HCC software does not assume the crystallization well is centered in the image -- it finds the circle first, and then performs analysis on the interior. Judging from the visualization, the analysis has picked the correct region in the well interior to examine (inside the droplet where precipitate and "skin" are visible). Generally, in cases such as yours where a portion of the the circular well is actually out of frame, we will lose a bit of information; however each experiment is photographed at 6 different time-points, so information about the reaction can be recovered from the previous or next image in the series.

Thanks again,

Christian

Good News, I won't bother uploading my pictures since mine look much similar to the example kindly provided by ashrader330.