Uploaded September 2012 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago

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Why do photos of stars often have spiky, pointy bits of them? These are called diffraction spikes and some people even add them artificially!

Here are explained by Professor Mike Merrifield (University of Nottingham) and Nik Szmanek (astrophotographer). Mike tweets at twitter.com/ProfMike_M

Some image credits:
Philip Perkins: astrocruise.com
Nik Szymanek: ccdland.net
Fred Espenak: astropixels.com

Deep Sky Videos website: deepskyvideos.com
Twitter: twitter.com/#!/DeepSkyVideos
Facebook: facebook.com/DeepSkyVideos
Flickr: flickr.com/photos/68847473@N02
More about the astronomers in our videos: deepskyvideos.com/pages/contributors.html

Videos by Brady Haran

A run-down of Brady's channels:
periodicvideos.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/here-are-my-channels.html