Space optical illusions

An earth-shattering optical illusion was just spotted in space

We've seen all manner of optical illusions over the past few years, involving everything from three-headed deer to rotating horses (via countless objects that appear to be moving but definitely aren't moving). Just when it feels like we've seen them all, another first pops up. Like this one. It's in space! 

The Hubble Space Telescope has captured a phenomenon known as Galactic Overlap, in which two galaxies – both more than a billion lightyears away from Earth – appear to have combined to create a sort of super-galaxy. Yep, it's one of the most far-out optical illusions we've seen.

According to the European Space Agency (ESA) , the galaxies, catchily named SDSS J115331 and LEDA 2073461, aren't actually colliding. Like "ships that pass in the night," they're simply brushing past one-another (and in reality, they're no doubt wildly far apart). 

The image comes from Galaxy Zoo, a "massive citizen science project which crowdsources galaxy classifications from a pool of hundreds of thousands of volunteers. " And over the course of the project, galaxies have been observed 'interacting' several times. Check out the gallery below for some more images from the Hubble Space Telescope featuring galaxies appearing to make contact.

Image 1 of 3

But the new photo, dated 5 September 2022, is easily the clearest vision yet of two spiral galaxies colliding – and a testament to the increasing capabilities of the Hubble Space Telescope. It would have made our best camera roundup if it wasn't 43.5 feet long and floating in space. 

Read more:

• Is this 16th century optical illusion the darkest ever?
• I've been staring at this trippy optical illusion for hours
• I promise the objects in this optical illusion are all the same colour

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Daniel Piper is Creative Bloq’s Senior News Editor. As the brand’s Apple authority, he covers all things Mac, iPhone, iPad and the rest. He also reports on the worlds of design, branding and tech. Daniel joined Future in 2020 (an eventful year, to say the least) after working in copywriting and digital marketing with brands including ITV, NBC, Channel 4 and more. Outside of Future, Daniel is a global poetry slam champion and has performed at festivals including Latitude, Bestival and more. He is the author of Arbitrary and Unnecessary: The Selected Works of Daniel Piper (Selected by Daniel Piper).

The Top Five Space Illusions

Martian Irrigation Canals

As bizarre as it may seem now, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries it was commonly believed that there were artificial canals on Mars. The rumor started in 1877 when Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli observed long, linear features on Martian surface through his telescope. He named the features “canali,” which translates to “channels” or “canals” in Italian. Schiaparelli did not intend for the term to be interpreted as “artificial” canals; he actually meant simply “narrow waterways.” But the coined phrase took on a life of its own, and some people even believed that Martian intelligent life had constructed a canal system to bring water from the polar regions to its cities.

Astronomer Percival Lowell was a strong proponent of this theory, and he envisioned Mars as a planet laced with engineered waterways and canals. Because straight lines don’t typically appear in nature, Lowell rationalized, they could only have been made by an intelligent civilization. In 1909, a Greek astronomer named E.M. Antoniadi used an 83-centimeter telescope to observe Mars when it was in opposition to the Earth, which is the best time to observe a planet. He concluded that the canals were an optical illusion, and the Martian canal theory slowly began to lose support.

Metal Bridges on the Moon

In 1953, John J. O’Neill, a science editor with the New York Herald Tribune, reported seeing something that looked like a bridge in the Moon’s Crisium Basin region. He reported, “a gigantic natural bridge having the amazing span of about 12 miles from pediment to pediment.” Although O’Neill had been careful to call it a “natural bridge,” soon thereafter British astronomer and moon mapper H. Percy Wilkins confirmed the bridge’s existence and mentioned it in his book Our Moon. In fact, he hinted that the bridge was artificially engineered. Wilkins had a following of believers — including several astronomers — who were convinced the bridge existed. But the British Astronomical Association wasn’t so supportive — they forced Wilkins to resign as director of the Lunar Section.

The “bridge” was, of course, an illusion created by lighting conditions and shadows on the Moon’s surface. The myth was finally put to rest when the Apollo missions obtained photographs of the region.

The “Face” on Mars

For many, the lessons of the “bridge” on the Moon didn’t sink in, and in the 1970s light and shadow combined once again to create an illusion — this time on the surface of Mars. Photographs taken of the Martian surface by the Viking Mission cameras captured a landform that resembled a human face. The “face” — which was actually a mesa — was located in the Cydonia region of Mars, an area whose geography is much like that of the Colorado Plateau in the southwestern United States. The Viking cameras happened to take the image at a time of day when shadows caused the mesa to have a face-like pattern, so scientists on the Viking team jokingly named the land formation the “Face on Mars.” They had no idea what they had started, and a media frenzy ensued, with many face-believers being convinced that NASA was covering up evidence of civilization on Mars.

The Mars Face mania became so intense that when the Mars Global Surveyor arrived at Mars in the late 1990s, NASA instructed mission scientists to reprogram the spacecraft so that it could look in the direction of “the face” and take the highest resolution photograph possible. The resulting images confirmed that the “face” was indeed an eroded mesa that, at certain times of the day, looked like a face due to shadows created by gullies in the eroded rock. In fact, the “face” is only one of thousands of similar mesas, buttes, and ridges in the Cydonia region.

The Incan City on Mars

Some die-hard Mars Face fans still believed in a conspiracy even after images from the Mars Global Surveyor revealed a mesa, and their beliefs were further fueled by images that showed what looked like an ancient Incan city. The photo, which was taken of an area near Mars’ south pole, shows a series of grid-like formations. In 1972 a team of Mariner 9 scientists informally gave the name “Inca City” to the region because it resembled an ancient ruin. This time, the coined phrase didn’t spark a media spectacle, but scientists puzzled over what process could have created the unique pattern.

In 2002, scientists solved the mystery while analyzing images taken by the Mars Orbiter Camera. The images revealed that the ridges of “Inca City” were part of a larger circular structure, which is likely a large, ancient impact crater on Mars.

The Face of Jesus in the Eagle Nebula
Since its launch in 1990, the Hubble Space Telescope has sent hundreds of thousands of images back to Earth, giving us a close-up look at many mysteries of the universe. NASA has showcased many of these images in the “Astronomy Picture of the Day” series. One of the most famous images in this series was of the Eagle Nebula, taken by Hubble in 1995 and titled “Pillars of Creation.” After a photo was shown on CNN, the network began receiving hundreds of phone calls from people who believed they saw the face of Jesus in the nebula.

Nebulae are interstellar clouds of dust, hydrogen gas, and plasma — think clouds in space. So, just as people sometimes think they see “faces” in clouds on Earth, they also can perceive familiar shapes and forms in nebulae. What looked to many like the face of Jesus was actually a swirl of gas located about 7,000 light years from Earth. In fact, as Dr. Philip Plait points out on the web site Bad Astronomy, when the light that allowed the image to be taken left the Eagle Nebula cloud, it was still another 5,000 years before Jesus would even be born.

A Happy Face on Mars?

Psychologists say humans often perceive random shapes and forms as significant — a phenomenon known as pareidolia. But for scientists who spend hours analyzing satellite data and space imagery, assigning humorous names to unusual formations that look like familiar shapes is all in a day’s work. Take, for example, the “Happy Face Crater” and the “Valentine’s Day Mesa” on Mars.

See the full gallery!

Spooky Optical Illusion: A 'Black Hole' Looks Like It's Getting Closer The image is completely static, but the researchers note that it gives people "a growing sense of darkness, as if they are entering a space devoid of light."

Illusory forward movement may be our mind's way of preparing us for a change of scenery. The researchers suggest that by predicting the transition from bright to dark, our visual system can adjust much faster to potentially dangerous conditions.

“Just as bright light can be dazzling, going dark is probably dangerous when navigating in a darkened environment,” the authors write in the paper. – Although, as in any illusion, this virtual expanding darkness is experienced at the expense of believability. After all, the observer does not move forward and does not enter any dark space.

Illusion of an "expanding hole". (Laeng et al., Front. Hum. Neurosci., 2022)

The first study to analyze this optical illusion examined how the color of the hole and its surrounding dots affects our mental and physiological responses. To do this, a group of 50 participants with normal vision were presented with images of an "expanding hole" of different colors on a screen. In the series, they were also shown encrypted versions of the illusion with no distinguishable pattern of light or color.

But the forward movement illusion was most effective when the hole was black. In this case, 86% of the participants “saw” that darkness was approaching them. Tracking the participants' eye movements revealed that their pupils unconsciously dilated at the sight of the black hole. And if the hole in the center was white, their pupils constricted, but only slightly.

"Here we show, based on the new "expanding hole" illusion, that the pupil responds to how we perceive light - even if this "light" is imaginary, as in the illusion - and not just to the amount of light energy that really enters the pupil,” says psychologist Bruno Laeng of the University of Oslo in Norway. “The illusion of an expanding hole causes a corresponding dilation of the pupil, as would happen if the darkness actually increased.”

The authors do not yet know why 14% of participants did not experience any illusory expansion when the hole was black. But even among those who perceived the illusion, the strength of the sensation varied. Those who "felt" the expansion of the hole more had a greater pupil dilation.

"Our results show that the pupillary dilation or contraction reflex is not a closed mechanism, like a photocell opening a leaflet, immune to any other information than the actual amount of light stimulating the photoreceptor," says Laeng. “Rather, the eye adjusts to perceived and even imagined light, rather than just physical energy.”

The authors have a hypothesis why this happens. When the central area is black, our pupils are probably preparing us for a change in brightness in the near future. Instead of seeing the information that is presented right in front of us, the visual neural network predicts how this information will change in the future, creating an illusory "outward expansion" of the central area of ​​the "hole".

If the brain didn't do this, new visual information would take milliseconds longer to reach the higher brain processes. If our pupils took this long to dilate, we might not be able to navigate in the dark as effectively.

Elena Krasnova

Source

About what I'm interested in - LiveJournal

I stumbled upon a brochure bought for one and a half rubles in 1991, which I could guess from the last pages (I will give illustrations for the brochure and the last page at the end of the material).
At that time, a lot of this flooded onto the shelves and was extremely popular. But even now, as it seemed to me, it's fun to look through and can be used in a pleasant company gathered for leisure.
From other literature at that time, I already knew that the druids were ancient tribes, pagans, whose trees were sacred. Accordingly, each newborn had its own sacred tree - a patron, embracing with which he could receive strength and health from him. Naturally, there was also a horoscope, i.e. a list of certain character traits of a person, determined precisely by his tree.
( Read more...Collapse )

OUR REQUESTS
TO THE DOCTORS AND NURSE OF THE MATERNITY HOSPITAL

It was like this: we were invited to a Moscow maternity hospital, and we told doctors, obstetricians, nurses (30 people gathered) about what you had already read in previous publications of The Family. There was no end to the questions:
— Did you drink unboiled water?
- Completely undressed in the cold?
— Why feed immediately?
And so on. ( Read more...Collapse )

MOTHER'S MILK
NATURE AND SCIENCE VOTE FOR, AND MOTHER?
The artificial baby food industry has taken over the world with its products and continues to grow rapidly. Advertising guarantees a complete replacement of mother's milk with easy-to-prepare, absolutely harmless (Read more...Collapse)

While sorting through regular newspaper clippings, I attacked a selection from the Semya newspaper for 1989, Nos. 20, 23, 24, 25 and 26.
I remember very well how popular the information about this amazing family. At times I thought how hard it is for a large family to experience such attention.
Directly with books then it was not easy, and therefore I carefully preserved this publication. After rereading it, I thought that even today all the information in it remains quite relevant. So I decided to scan and post.

The scans themselves are here:
https://disk.yandex.ru/d/bC9Klc1HTNaiCg

And here is the site of this wonderful FAMILY: ...Collapse)

for the baby. The child is already developed enough to play; he is awake for at least half the day; his body has become stronger, grasping abilities are rapidly developing; vision is almost the same as that of an adult; the need to communicate with adults is growing. Your baby is no longer tormented by sharp pains in the stomach, you have a long-awaited opportunity to sleep at night, all this, of course, contributes to an atmosphere of calm and joy from communication between all family members. At this age, children, as a rule, have a good mood, they seem to be proud of their own successes and are not yet afraid of contact with new people and new situations in general. During this period of a child's life, coordination of movements improves, the connection between hands and eyes becomes clearer: the baby begins to see objects in three dimensions. In addition, he learns to sit with minimal support and begins to crawl. ( Read more...Collapse )

Looking through the old deposits of treasured paper "wealth", I came across a selection of clippings from the 1991 newspaper "Family", which published Diana Simkin's book "Gentle Touch". I decided to look, maybe the book itself is already on the Internet? I was surprised to find that there are some unattractively designed texts, but there is no book at all. ( Read more...Collapse )

It all started with the fact that I digitized my old and very beloved postcards with dolls from childhood, then rummaged through the open spaces and very significantly supplemented my collection. Enjoy... (Read More ... Collapse)

Tags:

• Keys,
• Foreigners about us,
• We are the eyes of foreigners,
• Russian language,

Continue...

You won't believe it. We have a very romantic history. Well, as expected, it can not be without tears. I understand that the girl who got lost in the metro in Moscow is still Russian-speaking. Perhaps that is why she is crying again, so I want to prescribe antidepressants to all of them! I was glad that she did not immediately sob, but thought about it, I hope she has not lost everything

(Read More ... Collapse)

Tags:

• Klyuchs,
• Foreigners about us,
• We are the eyes of foreigners,
• Russian,
• Russian
• Russian
• textbook

Today, more than ever, the issue of the ever-increasing amount of garbage is very acute. So Vladimir Vladimirovich repeatedly complained that in our country no one has been doing this for many decades. ( Read more...Collapse )

The name alone is salivating)))
Here is the poster: http://www.istoki-pp.info/vse-novosti/anons/programma.html, and we decided that we must visit there. We are going to Bolshie Dvory to the "Prince's Court".
True, we did not have time to start, but what we saw quite delivered)))

Loved the idea!
Why not a European service? After all, at a time when parents need to make the necessary purchases, a child can organize time much more pleasant than wandering between the trading racks, where the only entertainment for him is to beg for something to buy, even if it is necessary only to attract attention to himself. And here…..

0018 Lev Oshanin…. . She just said, and immediately a whirlwind in her head: her favorite school, her favorite teacher of Russian and literature Lilia Nikandrovna Yanchenko (Irkutsk, school No. 34, 1967-1971). It was she who revealed Lev Oshanin to us not only as a famous songwriter (and then there were no those who did not hear this NAME), but also as a poet who is able to look into the very depths of your soul and evoke unusually sharp feelings of striving for pure, bright, to JUSTICE!!!!!