Coned

Original Photo Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/P.S. Teixeira (Center for Astrophysics)

I cropped a section out of a photo of the Cone Nebula, and after some pondering I realized that the section I had selected showed a formation that strongly resembled a rose.

No this isn't a plot for The Da Vinci Code, Part II...this is an actual section of the sky seen by hundreds of astronomers...I just happened to see it's "Rose-Ness", or Rosiness, of it. ;)

Anyway, this is an example of genuinely unintentional recognition of the facts after-the-fact. ;) Maybe it's the artist in me, but I didn't even notice this formation until perhaps a month after I cropped and enlarged the section.

This phenomenon is why I rarely take even eyewitness testimony at face-value...yes, the human mind seems incredibly artistic with reality itself.

How the information is presented by the witness can literally alter a person's perception of what was actually observed.

All I'm doing is pointing out that just having observed something often isn't good enough to have instantly gleaned all the facts of a situation, and the very act of trying to remember what REALLY HAPPENED can itself skew a person's own perception of what happened.

So the question remains, was this rose formation TRULY there before I saw it?

--mattergy

Addendum April 4
Every once-in-a-while, I go back and check my references (since I DO have brain-damage) if I'm uncertain later about the origin of original photos...the photo shown is actually my cropped version of the Spitzer Telescope image of the Snowflake Cluster segment of the Cone Nebula (the whole group formally called NGC 2264--The Cone Nebula and The Christmas Tree Cluster), rotated 90-degrees counter-clockwise, and enlarged, so I wasn't in error, I just realized that my reference to the current APOD image of the entire Cone Nebula was confusing.