Why Is Darth Vader On The PacBio Revio Flowcell?

I spent a bit more time looking at heat maps of Revio flowcells after my last post. Taking all the runs from here and averaging over the datasets. This let me produce more complete heat maps of the SNR over the chip.

You can find these after the break below, but one interesting find was the above pattern of ZMWs that never produce any reads. Regions of inactive sensors can be reasonably common (where they may be used for QC/temp sensors/background estimation etc.). Someone PacBio engineers have created a picture of Darth Vader out of intensionally inactivated ZMWs (thanks to those who pointed it out!)! I guess this is some kind of in-joke, but I hope Disney don’t come after PB for flowcell royalties! :)