[maxander]

From the article:

> Once out of the telescope, the data is going through a new, almost automatic data-processing system we’ve developed.

Of course, they don't go into detail (instead making a very odd analogy to a bread machine), but I think the implication is that the data is processed immediately before being recorded. A similar approach is used at the LHC.

A better analogy might be; when you take a picture on your phone, it comes out of the camera chip in a form equivalent to a bitmap file. But those are big and a pain to deal with, so its converted to jpeg or something else reasonable before being stored, perhaps losing a bit of irrelevant noise in the process.