What are the black stripes?
In the Infrared and X-ray images, the black stripes indicate missing data. Both the IRAS spacecraft, which surveyed the infrared sky, and the ROSAT spacecraft, which surveyed the X-ray sky, operated in a scanning mode, observing one narrow swath of sky in each orbit. If data were lost in transmission or if the instrument were turned off for a span of time, the resulting gap in the coverage appears as a stripe.
