After a bit of digging - it looks like it's done to sharpen features as one of the standard steps in producing these images. Where there are rotational symmetries in the things they're looking at, they focus on the smallest unit, and then rotate accordingly. If you had a trilateral symmetry, or hexagonal structure, they'd rotate 3 or 6 times around the center.

You're not getting a real image of the thing, but apparently it's got data from those other segments mixed in with the rotations, so you're getting a kind of idealized structure, to make the details being studied pop out, but if you have some sort of significant deviation, damage, or non symmetric feature it'll show up as well.

It's called "imposed symmetry" https://discuss.cryosparc.com/t/what-is-actually-occuring-wh...

Neat stuff, cool thing to catch!

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Terr_ a day ago | parent [-]

So kind of like taking a picture of a human, and then taking each half, flipping along the midline, and blending to get an idealized Symmetrical Human?

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hnlmorg 21 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Humans aren’t symmetrical though.

This would more like zooming into one edge of a snowflake and then rotating it.

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Terr_ 21 hours ago | parent [-]

> Humans aren’t symmetrical though.

Perhaps you assumed a "radially" which wasn't part of my analogy? :p

Land animals have a pretty consistent trend of exterior bilateral symmetry which is very noticeable. (Naturally, a completely normal Hunam such as myself cannot speak for how it may work in places other than my home planet Dirt.)

	▲	hnlmorg 16 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I understood you meant bilateral symmetry. And yes, there are similarities, but we are not bilaterally symmetric. At least not to the extent where you can flip an image and have that look normal. Even faces look weird when flipped that way (there have been studies on this effect too). And that’s before you get into the issue that it’s common to have differently shaped breasts, different sized hands or feet. Ears shaped differently. Non-uniform teeth. And so on and so forth.
	▲	yencabulator 12 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Only superficially. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axial_twist_theory

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21 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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