SMACS 0723's image, photographed in Infrared by James Webb Space Telescope, is projected on the marble in Death Valley's Mosaic Canyon. The rock is dated to precambrian, the oldest geological era of Earth. Each of the colorful smudges in is a distant galaxy as grand as our own Milky Way, each of them emitted the light we see today, 4.6 thousand million years ago, when Earth was born. The bright stars with 6 or more spikes are not ones of these distant galaxies; they are "nearby" stars in the foreground of SMACS 0723. They are, rather, a signature of JWST: the 6 spikes are caused by its hexagonal mirrors. Hubble's bright stars, on the other hand, has 4 spikes. NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI