VISUAL INTEREST: LENS FLARES PART 3

I wanted to do a study on lens flare association. One of the early ones I learned in school was how the anamormic, oval lens produced streaking flares most associated with higher-production value feature films. As shown in the Temple of Doom:

But I wanted to dig a little deeper and look at two of my favorite study subjects: sports broadcasts and Space. I have an example below from a lens flares white paper on which bladed-apertures produce particular types of flares:

https://www.cg.tuwien.ac.at/research/publications/2017/Walch-2017-DA/Walch-2017-DA-.pdf

SPORTS

Sports are generally photographed with 6-bladed lenses fro broadcast, giving sports a look tied to their flares:

SPACE

While some 5/6-bladed lenses were used on Apollo 11 (the famous moon surface Hasslebad lenses), this lens style of a 5-6 bladed aperture is not exactly unique to Space. The more narrowing question is, what lens flare style is specific to deep Space?

The unique lens flare style of deep Space is a four bladed-flare from Hubble:

So what would it look like if you transferred the lens association of Space to sports?

The flares from the video above are from a camera with a 4-bladed aperture. However, the flares from Hubble are not a result of a square aperture because the Hubble doesn’t have a camera’s lens. According to NASA:

“The rather beautiful four-pointed shape of foreground stars distributed around ESO 162-17 also draws the eye. This is an optical effect introduced as the incoming light is diffracted by the four struts that support the Hubble Space Telescope’s small secondary mirror.”

- https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/hubbles-look-at-an-extragalactic-peculiarity

The Subaru telescope has two struts holding the secondary mirror together resulting in unique “bi-flares”: