Starship Asterisk*

My guess is that they are internal reflections from elements of the telescope or CCD. They're aperiodic because they're the reflection of stars outside of the camera field; only stars at a very specific distance outside of the field reflect right to appear as streaks. I'd guess they streak out radia...

Is there a (roughly circular) area of reddening around Proxima? Is it an artefact? Is it dust absorpsion? Am I imagining things? I see it too. Try importing it into some photo editing program and cranking the saturation way up.... really brings it out. It looks like reddening due to dust absorption...