Night Sky: Hints

• There's a preliminary discovery the next few hints clue without which you can make basically no progress.
• This hint clues a sort-of aha moment. Most of the flavortext of this puzzle is very important.
• This hint clues a sort-of aha moment. You probly can't solve this puzzle just by looking at it.
• This hint strongly clues a sort-of aha moment. What might "It's not as black and white as one might think." mean?
• This hint gives away a sort-of aha moment. The exact pixel color values are important. Use some program to get them.
• The dots are all the same size, and each dot is of uniform color.
• The dots could be replaced with single pixels in their centers and the puzzle would be at least as solvable.
• As you can see from the remaining hints, the rest of this puzzle is more or less a series of aha moments. They are aha moments, but they're related and not huge.
• This hint clues an aha moment. The rest of the flavortext is still important.
• This hint clues an aha moment. Look at the distribution of the pixels' RGB values.
• This hint clues an aha moment. Specifically, for now, of the red value.
• This hint strongly clues an aha moment. Notice how some red values occur but aren't common?
• This hint strongly clues an aha moment. Specifically, the odd ones?
• This hint very strongly clues an aha moment. How might the above hints tie in with the flavortext?
• This hint gives away an aha moment. Consider only the pixels/dots with odd red value ("oddities", both because their red value is odd and because there aren't as many).
• This hint clues an aha moment. Look at the distribution of those pixels' RGB values.
• This hint clues an aha moment. Specifically, for now, of the green value.
• This hint strongly clues an aha moment. Each green value occurs the same number of times (2 dots, 42 pixels).
• This hint strongly clues an aha moment. We can pair up the remaining dots by their green value.
• This hint strongly clues an aha moment. Compare the center locations and RGB values of paired dots. Notice anything?
• This hint strongly clues an aha moment. Specifically, the center locations and RGB values are the same mod 2. (This is trivial for the red and green values, but not for the blue values.)
• This hint very strongly clues an aha moment. How might the above hints tie in with the flavortext?
• This hint very strongly clues an aha moment. Specifically, with "determine what the similarities mean".
• This hint gives away an aha moment. For each pair of remaining dots with the same green value ("similarities"), replace them with a single dot with the average ("mean") of their properties (location and color).
• This hint clues an aha moment. There are two things you could do now, both of which you've done before.
• This hint clues an aha moment. These two things are to look at the remaining flavortext and to look at the distribution of those pixels' RGB values. If you do the first, look at the hints marked 1. If you do the second, look at the hints marked 2. Feel free to do both, of course; that's probably most helpful.
• 1, This hint clues an aha moment. Which part of the flavortext might be relevant and hasn't already been used?
• 1, This hint strongly clues an aha moment. The first two of the three parts of the "I'm planning to..." sentence have been used.
• 1, This hint gives away an aha moment. Let's use the third part, "connect the dots". Unfortunately, this doesn't tell us which dots to connect. For that, we can either guess based on proximity or look at RGB values.
• 2, This hint clues an aha moment. Which part of the RGB values might we expect to use?
• 2, This hint strongly clues an aha moment. We used red, then we used green.
• 2, This hint strongly clues an aha moment. Let's use the blue values.
• 2, This hint strongly clues an aha moment. The blue values are everything from 230 to 238 once, and 239 twice.
• 2, This hint very strongly clues an aha moment. Dots with adjacent blue values are generally close, and the line between them is generally at a nice angle (a multiple of 45 degrees).
• 2, This hint gives away an aha moment. Let's connect dots with adjacent blue values.
• We now have an image, apparently, of some symbol. What symbol is it?
• This hint suggests a method of doing research and can be skipped. If you don't know what this symbol is, using some tool that lets you draw an image of a symbol to see what it is might help.
• This symbol has one common meaning and one uncommon meaning. One of these meanings is clearly more thematic than the other given the title of this puzzle ("Night Sky"), and that one's the answer.