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Cone nebula (APOD 09 May 2007)

Posted: Wed May 09, 2007 2:14 pm
by BMAONE23
what is the cause of the multi-color multiple occurance of the 6 segmented diffraction spikes? Does spitzer opperate with a segmented primary mirror? If so, could this be caused by an alignment error. Notice in the IRAC image, the two largest stellar light sources have a series of 6 flares but have multiple spikes in the 6 primary directions also the spikes are in different colors.
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/image/ ... er_big.jpg