Why are stars spiky? - Deep Sky Videos

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 https://twitter.com/ProfMike_M

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

Deep Sky Videos website: http://www.deepskyvideos.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/#!/DeepSkyVideos
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/DeepSkyVideos
Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/68847473...
More about the astronomers in our videos: http://www.deepskyvideos.com/pages/co...

Videos by Brady Haran

A run-down of Brady's channels:
http://periodicvideos.blogspot.co.uk/...

• Category

  • Science & Technology

• License

  • Standard YouTube License