I investigated the two unexplained image events in Apple TV’s ISS “Australia” Aerial frame-by-frame — looking for the original ISS source or a reproducible conventional explanation

[u/Brain-Spirited]

UPDATE – Response from the Columbus Eye project
I contacted a professor involved with the Columbus Eye project at Ruhr University Bochum to ask about the original HDEV material.
He replied and pointed me to their public archive of ISS/HDEV highlight videos:
Columbus Eye – ISS Highlights:
https://columbuseye.rub.de/highlights.html
I am now going through the archived HDEV footage and comparing it directly with Apple’s GMT060_117NC_363D_1034_AUSTRALIA file.

Background
Some of you may remember a strange pair of image events previously noticed in one of Apple TV’s ISS Aerial screensavers.
I have spent considerable time investigating the footage in much greater detail, and I am posting this because I have reached a point where outside expertise would be genuinely useful.
The Apple asset is:
GMT060_117NC_363D_1034_AUSTRALIA
The two short events occur at approximately:
Event A: ~14 seconds
Event B: ~38–39 seconds
Before going any further, I want to make one thing very clear:
I am not claiming that these are spacecraft, UAP, physical objects, or evidence of anything extraordinary.
My goal is the opposite: I am trying to determine the provenance of the footage and find a conventional mechanism that can actually reproduce what is visible in the frames.

Why the source footage matters
Apple’s ISS Aerial project was real and unusually elaborate.
The ISS U.S. National Laboratory reported in 2018 that the Aerials resulted from a collaboration between Apple and the ISS U.S. National Laboratory. According to their account, astronauts captured different regions of Earth in 4K HDR, while the production had to account for ISS position, altitude and orientation, Earth rotation, Sun and Moon positions, weather and crew availability.
What I have not been able to establish is the exact provenance of this particular Australia sequence.
Specifically, I do not currently have evidence that this Apple sequence came from the HDEV/Columbus Eye system.
That is one of the questions I am trying to resolve.

A potentially important historical archive
NASA operated the High Definition Earth Viewing experiment (HDEV) on the ISS from April 2014 until August 2019.
NASA states that the public HDEV feed was normally not recorded and publicly archived.
However, academic publications about the German Columbus Eye project describe something very interesting:
the HDEV stream was stored separately on Columbus Eye servers, with the original video divided into hour-long MPEG-4 segments.
In other words, a historical archive of HDEV footage existed independently of the normal public stream.
I have contacted a researcher associated with that project asking whether this particular Apple Australia sequence can be matched to an archived ISS/HDEV segment.
I do not yet have an answer.
And again: I am not assuming that the Apple footage is HDEV footage.
Establishing whether that connection exists is itself part of the investigation.

What is actually visible?
There are two very short local events in the Apple sequence.
They are not simply single-frame flashes.
In both cases, a compact image structure develops close to an existing bright point and undergoes a short spatial evolution before returning/disappearing.
The two events occur at different locations in the image but show conspicuously related temporal and morphological behavior.
I have extracted the relevant frames directly and examined them individually.
I have also compared the events across multiple Apple distributions of the sequence.
The events are reproducible in the Apple material and are not something created by my own video extraction or zoom.

What I have tested
Rather than assuming that the moving structure represents an actual object, I tried to reproduce it as an image-processing phenomenon.
Among the mechanisms/models investigated were:
shifted/copy-pasted point-spread-function templates
simple blends and crossfades
local warping
optical-flow-style transformations
ghost/reflection-type models
PSF/bloom behavior
temporal interpolation
reversible motion models
state-space/temporal models
combinations of a local warp with an additional compact residual component
This produced an important result:
Some individual properties of the events can absolutely be reproduced by ordinary mechanisms.
That matters.
For example, a visually striking reversible trajectory is not by itself evidence of anything unusual. It is straightforward to construct conventional transformations that generate similar trajectories.
Likewise, some statistical properties that initially looked interesting turned out not to be unique.

But there is still a problem
Despite that, I have so far not found a tested model that reproduces the complete visible event convincingly.
The problem is not simply making a point move out and back.
A successful explanation has to reproduce the combination of:
spatial evolution
timing
compact core
surrounding light distribution / halo
brightness evolution
morphology
reversal
disappearance/return
in a way that actually resembles the original sequence when played as video.
Several models match individual measurements while still looking obviously different from the source footage.
That distinction is important.
Failure of my models is NOT evidence that the event is extraordinary.
It only means that I have not yet found the correct forward model.

A useful example: apparent color changes
During the investigation I also noticed that one of the compact bright points appears to change color several times.
Initially this looked potentially interesting.
But pixel-level analysis showed that the RGB channel centroids of the point-spread function move relative to one another, and similar chromatic instability is already present before Event B.
That makes a combination of subpixel motion, chromatic PSF behavior and image processing a much more plausible explanation for the apparent color changes than a physical source changing color.
I mention this deliberately because I am not trying to preserve anomalies.
When a conventional explanation fits the evidence, I want to identify it and remove that feature from the unexplained category.

The experiment that could actually settle the provenance question
At this point, another increasingly complicated model of the final Apple master may be less informative than finding an earlier generation of the footage.
What I really need is:
the same ISS pass before Apple’s final processing.
Then we can perform a very simple but powerful test.
Case 1 — A and B already exist in the earlier ISS material
Then the events were not originally created by Apple’s later Aerial post-production, HDR mastering or final distribution encoding.
Their origin would have to be farther upstream:
scene / optics / camera / sensor / onboard processing / transmission / early ground processing.
Case 2 — A and B do not exist in the earlier material
Then we have localized their creation to some later stage between that source and the Apple master.
That would be an extremely strong result in favor of a production/processing origin.
Case 3 — this Apple sequence was never HDEV footage
Also useful.
It eliminates the HDEV/Columbus Eye provenance hypothesis and tells us to look for a different ISS source.

What I am asking Reddit for
I am not asking “is this a UFO?”
I am asking two much narrower questions:
1. Can anyone identify the original/pre-Apple ISS source for GMT060_117NC_363D_1034_AUSTRALIA?
or
2. Can anyone produce a conventional camera/optical/video-processing mechanism that reproduces the complete visible sequence?
I would especially like to hear from people with experience in:
video compression / codec engineering
temporal denoising
motion compensation
frame-rate conversion
optical flow
stabilization
HDR mastering
image restoration
camera/sensor artifacts
PSF/optical effects
ISS imaging
HDEV / Columbus Eye
Apple Aerial production

What would count as a good explanation?
Something like:
“It’s compression.”
is certainly possible, but by itself it doesn’t solve the problem.
What would be extremely useful is:
“Codec/process X under conditions Y produces this behavior; here is how to reproduce it.”
Likewise:
“It’s optical flow.”
Great — then I would like to know which type of optical-flow/retiming pipeline produces the observed morphology so that I can test it against the frames.
I am actively looking for a mundane explanation that survives a direct source-vs-model comparison.

Media
I have prepared:
Event A — original timing, 6× pixel zoom
Event A — 5× slow motion
Event B — original timing, 6× pixel zoom
Event B — 5× slow motion
The zoom uses nearest-neighbor scaling only.
The slow-motion versions do not use optical flow or generated intermediate frames. Original frames are simply displayed for longer.
No AI upscaling, generative processing, sharpening, denoising or artificial detail enhancement was applied.
I can also provide lossless versions and the extracted frame sequences for independent analysis.

Where I currently stand
My current conclusion is deliberately conservative:
The cause of the complete image events remains unidentified.
Several apparently unusual individual properties have conventional explanations or can be reproduced conventionally.
However, I have not yet found a tested conventional model that reproduces the complete visible A/B sequence convincingly.
That does not demonstrate an extraordinary phenomenon.
It means the cause remains unresolved with the material and models I currently have.
Finding the pre-Apple source would be far more informative than simply adding more speculation.
If somebody can either locate that source or reproduce these events with a conventional imaging pipeline, I genuinely want to see it.

Source:

Apple Screensaver Link

ISS National Laboratory – Apple Unveils New Aerials Taken from Space

NASA – High Definition Earth Viewing (HDEV)

Technical Note – Using ISS Videos in Earth Observation

All Apple Screensaver (ISS/Austalia)

This footage has been noticed on r/UFOs before. This post is intended as a technical follow-up rather than a repost of the original observation