Spooky Astronomy

The Face on Mars (1976)

It's that time of year when pumpkins begin appearing everywhere and darkness arrives earlier in the evening. We humans generally enjoy being spooked a bit, to be scared of things we do not fully understand or cannot fully explain. And looking up into the night sky, imaginations can run wild.  In 1976 the Viking landers took this iconic picture of the Martian landscape and many people saw a face in the picture. Since then, much better resolution images have come from Mars landers and orbiters and we now know that this is an optical illusion, a unique view that was fortuitous timing and also due to the fairly rudimentary camera that were on that early Mars mission. This is but one of many things people see in the sky, including UFOs and aliens, asteroids and comets, that strike fear into those seeing these objects. 

Several years ago I prepared a Halloween lecture called Spooky Astronomy that I have presented at the Munich Public Observatory (Volkssternwarte München). In this lecture, I share many more such examples of optical illusions, of real and less-real things we see in the sky, and talk about the science behind them. I have updated the talk and will present it again this week, in costume. It's fun, it's playful, it's a bit serious too, and bottom line, it's about learning. I have created a podcast version of this for the Observatory's podcast series, Translunar. You can hear it here. 

Image courtesy of NASA.