What am I looking at here at Google Sky? I was looking through the Google Sky map, when an object caught my eye:



I am really curious as to what this is (just a big star? then why does it look so peculiar?) 

It's hard to search for online because I don't know which words to use. If anyone can point me in the right directon please?
It's a star with pretty strong diffraction spikes.
To find out which one it is, you can just look up its coordinates in databases like SIMBAD. 
Then you find that it is the star Xi Cygni.
You can also find some information on it on Wikipedia.