This is why the first image of JWST looks full of "lens flare"
The stars in new images from the James Webb Space Telescope look sharper than ever before. And I’m not just talking about the image quality, which is amazing. I talk about the fact that many of the bright stars in the picture have very different nails from the Christmas decorations or, as one of my colleagues put it, “This looks like a JJ Abrams promo poster, and I love it. ” But this is not a case of too much lens flare. Those are diffraction spikes, and if you look closely, you’ll see that all the bright objects in the JWST image have the same eight-pointed pattern. The brighter the light, the more prominent the features. Dimmer objects such as nebulae or galaxies are less likely to see this distortion. This diffraction spike pattern is unique to JWST. If you compare the images taken by the new telescope with the images taken by its predecessors, you will see that Hubble only has four diffraction spikes for the eight JWSTs. (Two JWST spikes can be very dim, so sometimes it ap