On July 19, 1952, Palomar Observatory was undertaking a photographic survey of the night sky. Part of the project was to take multiple images of the same region of sky, to help identify things such as asteroids. At around 8:52 that evening a photographic plate captured the light of three stars clust...
The third option, radiation damage to the plates, sounds the most plausible to me.
It would pre-expose the plate in the same manner as a double exposure in a roll of film so the "stars" would have already been on the plate before use.
We could point the JWST at it just to be sure though.
The article says it happened many times back in those days and this is just one example. If modern scopes and AI haven't seen anything like this then I'm quite confident that it was a problem with their tooling back then, with radioactive dust being the top contender.
I mean the dark forest strike that destroyed (Three body problem trilogy heavy spoilers) >!Trisolaris only took out one of the three stars, destroying all 3 is inefficient which goes against all the rules of a dark forest strike.!<
If you find that interesting, the history of pixels and computer displays gles far back.
They had pen touch displays all the way back in 1946, it's actually pretty interesting how long some of the tech that exploded in the mid 2000s has actually been around.
The public library in my town when I was a kid in the 80s replaced their card catalog with a touchscreen computer system. It barely worked, sometimes you had to press below where you were supposed to press, but the idea was cool.
Only because of the way it's written up. Writing an article about instrument failure isn't as appealing to a large audience. Even though there are a lot of people who do find that kind of stuff very interesting.