2MASS J17554042+6551277 is a completely unremarkable star. I'm not sure it's even visible to the naked eye, but if it is, just barely. It does have an entry in wikipedia now, because it was what the James Webb telescope pointed at to get its mirrors all nice and aligned. To achieve alignment, the tolerances have to be less than the wavelength of infrared light so all the mirrors are reflecting in phase to the receiver. Otherwise you just get a bunch of images from smaller mirrors superimposed on top of one another. But now, instead of 18 small mirror telescopes, there's one big one. It took a picture of 2MASS J17554042+6551277, and this is what NASA
released*:
Those six big spikes are optical artifacts, it's essentially like lens-flare, but replace lens with 18-perfectly-aligned-mirrors. So 18-perfectly-aligned-mirrors-flare. The JWST is so sensitve, it's getting glare off a barely visible star. This won't be as much of a problem when the JWST starts its serious work, 2MASS J1blahblah is only** ~2000 light years away, so much closer than the stuff JWST is going to study.
The truly remarkable thing is when you zoom in on those points of light behind 2MASSandsoforth.
Those are galaxies! Without meaning to or even trying, this thing is capturing pictures of galaxies!
And they still haven't even released the full resolution/data-set image because they're still perfecting the callibration and resolution***. Not to get too technical, but I believe they still have to de-sprongle the widgets and reverse the polarity of the sprockets.
*link to APOD's much larger image.
**in cosmological terms
***and NASA has been stung before by the tin-foil behatted extrapolating nonsense from slightly blurry images.
