Remember as a kid looking up at the blue sky and seeing a cloud that looked like a lamb, or a horse, or some other creature or familiar object on Earth? That same visual/mind phenomenon goes on with space images that have rocks, dust, and other natural patterns.
This happens because our human brains often try to see shapes that are familiar, something we can relate to. It happens with clouds, rocks, celestial bodies (e.g. the "man in the Moon," and the "face on Mars").
There's even a word for this phenomenon—pareidolia (pronounced pare-i-DOH-lee-uh). Dictionaries describe it as a human tendency to see recognizable shapes in objects or data that are otherwise not familiar to us.
There are some common examples on Earth, such as the profile of President John F. Kennedy on the Hawaiian Island of Maui.
Here at NASA, we often hear from people who think they see something familiar in an image from Mars, or another planet, or somewhere else in the cosmos. And it's true—they do see something familiar, but it's actually because they're experiencing pareidolia.
And we have examples of pareidolia we've heard about in space images.
One well-known example is seen in this image of a nebula, which some people perceived as a hand X-ray.
More Mars Pareidolia
There was the time people saw what they thought was a Sasquatch-shaped rock in images from the Spirit rover taken in 2008.
You can use this slider to see an original image, then slide to reveal details of the area, including examples of pareidolia.
Other Mars missions have also seen interesting objects, and people have assigned them human-relatable shapes, such as 2018 images from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter that appear to show a Muppet on Mars.
More Cosmic Confusion
Some space enthusiasts and image processors alter raw imagery downlinked from NASA spacecraft and share fan-made works online. The resulting images and video are fun to look at, but not scientifically accurate. In an ideal world, imagery like that would be clearly marked as an illustration or dramatization. But that doesn't always happen, or a caption gets lost or changed as it's shared on social media, so things can become murky and confusing.
One such catchy image that has made the rounds purports to show a Mars skyline, with clear views of three planets lined up in the sky—Earth, Venus, and Jupiter. It is not a NASA image and is not real, but it is an appealing-looking computer-generated image.
Complicating things even more—over the years NASA has sent multiple spacecraft to Mars, including several landers, rovers, orbiters, and even a helicopter. Sometimes, people get spacecraft images and video mixed up, so it can be hard to tell what image was taken when, by which spacecraft, and whether it's a legitimate NASA image.
So What's a Space Fan to Do?
You may wonder—how, can I figure out which images are real and which are not?
Any official NASA news or imagery will be shared via an official agency communications channel, including the extensive image and video databases. To search our primary imagery database, see: images.nasa.gov. For Mars images, see the raw image gallery.
And if you find an interesting artifact in an image on a NASA site, it's often the result of wind and nature carving interesting shapes in the terrain. For example, depending on what a rock is made of, wind erosion can polish and sculpt it into a strange-looking feature. See some examples here. And a spot in the Martian sky... that could be a speck of dust on a camera.
So armed with this knowledge, enjoy the images from space!
