The one-pass sigma clip of the background ring walked the reflection's whole box a second time,
recomputing every pixel's stencil distances and neighbour mask. Pass A now keeps the ring pixels the
clip reads (readable, not a neighbour's flux), with their radial offset, in pixel order, and the clip
sums those - the same values in the same order.
Measured on cytochrome C (CPU-only, Apple M6): the clip loop was 8.4% of CPU; the run is 4-5% faster
with this and the ring-histogram change together. Merged reflections and maps byte-identical.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
