But I’m so thirsty meow.

But its shiny, and smells interesting.

Forbidden juice…

Or a pond

funny mirror

Also known as the cabinet of curiosities, the door to the world that should not be seen, Medusa’s bane.

The wire will cause the entire image to become a little bit darker.

in a telescope light travels in many paths from start to finish. so a single wire will have a very soft shadow, which stretches over the entire image. This works because the wire is well within the focal length. If the wire was exactly at the focal length, it's shadow would be sharp, but the farther away it is from the focal length, the softer the shadow will become.

edit: when the object is exactly at the center of the image, then I think it will still cast a sharp shadow, because all the light-paths that go through the center, stay close to the center. Not sure though

It will only affect it materially if they cross where the light is converged / infocus. So if you put a big piece of paper where the wires are, the image will be blurred. So if you look at the wires from the focal point, they are also blurred enough to be able to see what's behind them

Like others have mentioned, the spider (the wires) and the secondary do shadow some light that would otherwise reach the primary. It also results in some artifacts due to diffraction; the view ends up convolved with the Fourier transform of the aperture. This is why on Hubble images, you see cross shaped stars, as that's the shape of the Fourier transform of its 4-strut spider.

Ehh, it's like most of the extinction-event movies of that time. It's dumb at points, but if everything was realistic, everything would be pretty damn boring. It's in my top 10 of that genre.