$cell phone diffraction spikes$

$cell phone diffraction spikes$

Cell phone diffraction spikes series#

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, writers used the asterisk symbol (*) as early as the 1300s.Įnglish amateur astronomer William Kitchiner wrote in 1825: The similarity of certain flowers to rayed stars is apparent in their names, such as Aster Atticus (golden starwort). Just look at early works of art, flags, ancient coins, and the charts of the Pleiades and Praesepe star clusters made by Galileo in 1610. Stars were being drawn with points or spikes long before Isaac Newton announced his reflecting telescope in 1671. The brighter the star, the brighter the spike.Were stars artistically depicted with diffraction spikes before the invention of the Newtonian reflector? If so, why? Galileo sketched the Praesepe star cluster (now known as the Beehive) in 1610. Not all images will include such spiky stars because the spikes are the most noticeable when the star is incredibly bright. That’s why the famous images coming from the Hubble show four spikes instead of six. The JWST’s three struts result in six spikes because each strut produces two spikes that appear as right angles.īy contrast, the Hubble Space Telescope has four struts that hold up the secondary mirror and each strut results in a spike also held at a right angle from it. As light from the star comes into the telescope, it has to bend around the struts which block the light.

$cell phone diffraction spikes$

Unlike the first hexagonal mirror, the secondary mirror is circular which also impacts the way that light reflects off of it. It’s also the second surface that light from the stars hits to create an image. The secondary mirror is necessary in order to direct light into the telescope.

$cell phone diffraction spikes$

The breaks in between the mirrors create rough lines of light that appear within the spikes if you look very closely at the image.Īdditionally, the JWST has three struts each placed 24 feet from the primary mirror that hold up the telescope’s secondary mirror.

Cell phone diffraction spikes series#

Plus, Webb’s hexagonal mirror is actually made up of a series of smaller mirrors - which have breaks between them and are also capable of reflecting light. The 21-foot mirror is capable of taking images that are so far away that we can study the history of the universe from the beginning of time.Įach of the 18 pieces which make up the huge mirror help to shape the way the light is reflected. In the image above, the six bright spikes are the result of the way light hits the JWST’s enormous hexagonal mirror. The brighter the star, the more likely we are to see spikes extending from its center. Diffracting lightįor starters, according to NASA, the spikes aren’t real they’re the result of the diffraction of light. But when you look closely, the stars in the image all have six large spikes, and two fainter horizontal spikes emanating from its center. When it was released to the public on on July 11, 2022, it revealed “a cluster teeming with thousands of galaxies,” according to NASA. The Hubble Space Telescope, launched in 1990, still takes images of spiky stars.īut most recently, the first full-color image from the James Webb Space Telescope, the largest optical telescope in space, showed a universe filled with stars. But it begs to question: Since stars aren’t spiked, why do we draw them that way in pictures? It may because stars, which are actually enormous fiery spheres, often appear with spikes in telescopic images. When my 7-year-old son doodles a star in the night sky, it’s almost always drawn with five spikes.

$cell phone diffraction spikes$