And the correct answer to the “Illusory Intensity” puzzle was…
TROY! This gas station cafe opened in 2014 after the Davarci family settled in Austin. Coming from Turkey, they brought to Troy some delightful local recipes, from mezes, wraps, and salads, to the popular Turkish coffee.
Most of the effort required in this puzzle is in determining what is being asked of us as solvers. We know that we need to identify the four “producers” but what could these producers be? Fortunately, there are a few clues to help us out. Of particular note is the puzzle’s references to “light producers” and “in the universe”. So we need something that creates light in outer space. Suns or stars are good guesses here, but we can get more specific by noting that there are a total of 88 of this type of light producer. After some searching, one can find that there are exactly 88 constellations.
Next we need to determine how we find constellations from the Greek letter levels given in the chart. Fortunately, we have a little more information to go off of with the date of the graph June 21-July 23. This happens to line up with the dates of the zodiac sign Cancer. Cancer is also a constellation, so we may look into this particular constellation in more detail to start. If we specifically pay attention to inclusions of Greek letters in the discussions of constellations, one may find lists such as this one that show each star in a constellation is given a Greek letter called a “Bayer Designation”. For Cancer specifically, the alpha star’s visible magnitude is 4.26 while the beta star’s visible magnitude is 3.53. Continuing to look up the magnitudes for the other stars in the constellation, we notice that this distribution matches perfectly with the green bars on the graph.
We do not have any hints to get us started in finding the remaining three constellations. However, now that we know what we are looking for, a few strategically chosen keywords will help a search engine find what we need. One could also reference a list of stars with the brightest magnitudes given like this one to find some of the constellations. In the end, the four constellations are:
Blue – Cygnus
Yellow – Crater
Red – Auriga
Green – Cancer
The final step is to place images of the constellations in their respective frames, being sure to rotate a constellation as indicated by the frames in the image. When this is done, we obtain the following image
Where one can directly read the answer: TROY
This week’s first-place Fastest Solver was Cardinality, followed by teams [Redacted] in second and davidsteinandfriends in third! Nice work, everyone!
Congrats everyone! And with that, the next puzzle, “Lakeside Music” has been posted! Good luck and happy solving!
Note: Troy is not affiliated with Mission Street Puzzles in any way.