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[locqust]

I was hoping that once this image had been decoded it would be a little clearer as to what it is....Im just as confused as before!

It could be a type of spectrograph, but not convinced of that.

[poozle]

I have no idea about the lines but I'd say the Xs are in some way relevent to positions its picked something up and we have to somehow work out where the centre point of all of them is and then, well, go there (be it a place on earth and us, or a place on perplex city and scarlett/violet go).

I don't think that description was any good tbh... if anyone doesn't understand I'll try explaining better (or if anyone does understand could they try describing it better ).

[ixalon]

Looking at the bottom it looks like the Y-axis is labelled "A" and whatever the X-axis is it appears to be something to do with geotargetting which is inversely proportional to "A".

Attached is my attempt at lining most of it up (I haven't moved the bottom right over to the left where it belongs though.)

[ThusQED]

Note that in the text, it talks about geopositioning in addition to vertical. Also, geopositioning is measured in terms of a range. That's why I imagine it looks a bit like a statistical diagram of sort.

Although it could be a literal position on a map but that would be rather useless for us since we already know where Maine ended up.

[ne0x]

Do you suppose the 'A' has to do with altitude? There were remarks on how the vertical accuracy was improving.

[Mima]

Another guess would be that "A" is just accuracy, we know that they were trying to target actual locations (rather than walls etc), and this could show a reducing margin of error. Therefore mainly improving, but with the odd outlier.

[makomk]

The image itself seems to be "scrambled" by removing 25-pixel long chunks of image data in various places, then reflowing the rest of the image data appropriately. I'm currently working on fixing it on that basis - hopefully it'll give better results.

ETA: Seems to work well so far. Looks like I'm about halfway down now.
ETA2: The second half of the image is messier. I'm about two-thirds through and I've had to skip 26 twice and delete a few pixels three times. Possibly corruption from extracting the GIF, possibly not. Anyway, the rest of the picture is even worse. I'm not sure I want to continue further, but my program and source image are attached (it's unscramble4.py, and you'll need Python and PIL to run it). Just add the number of pixels to add or skip and the co-ordinates at which you want to do it (in terms of the output image so far) to 'jumps' - the format should be obvious.

[Uhtoff]

Very impressive, I have absolutely no idea what you are doing!

Just a couple of thoughts - mako, I notice that there are horizontal bluish lines on your unscrambling of the gif that aren't on the others, is this an artefact of your process or a 'failing' in others? We have no scale at all, just the A at the origin apparently on the y-axis, this suggests to me that we have to use the graph as an overlay for another image (maybe one we don't have yet, maybe a puzzle card...) as there's no other exact data we could really get out of it. Also, I'm not entirely sure that the A is a label for the y-axis as this isn't how (or where) you would generally label it, maybe it's an alignment mark for whatever it overlies.

[TIAG]This seems like an awfully technical (and difficult) thing to be worked out if it's not important, which is why I think it's unlikely to be a record of accuracy of experiments as that isn't really information that we can use or would even want. Of course it might just be something to keep us occupied [/TIAG]

[ixalon]

[Uhtoff]

Good point, good point...although I still reckon that lighthouse map thing was a clue as to how to deal with something else that we are still missing.

[makomk]

[Mikeyj]

Has anyone updated the Scooby gang with what we've got so far on this? In light of recent events it might be good for them to be in possession of all relevant facts.

[rose]

I think they may have unscrambled it themselves or someone sent it to them.

I am wondering what the final result will be and if the current futures have a hint: somethin about the easiest solve not being the cleanest.

[makomk]

Just looking through the GIF to try and figure out where it's corrupted. Ixalon: you seem to have ended up with 1e at offset 141 (hex) when it should be a 2e; not sure how that happened.

ETA: better or worse?
ETA2: If I edit the image info to reduce the height slightly (effectively chopping the missing/corrupt bit off), programs will actually read it rather than rejecting it as corrupt...
ETA3: managed to mostly "unscramble" it. I think it might be slightly corrupt in a few places, and there's no way I'll be able to figure out the bottom of the image.

[Mima]

VHC tempfile