What do you see here? When I first saw this image taken by Gemini Observator’s Travis Rector, I thought to myself, “hmmm… interesting dust cloud and nebula.”

Peter Michaud, Gemini’s Public Information Officer, sent it to me along with a press release for me to edit. We chatted about the image, and he asked me if I thought it looked like a Chinese dragon. Up until that moment, I’d been thinking it looked like the snout of a bull, or some cosmic graffiti. A Chinese dragon hadn’t occurred to me.

The fact that the two of us could see such different things in it, all recognizable, is a fine example of pareidolia, the perception of a pattern or meaning in something that is actually ambiguous or random (see The Word Spy for other examples of targeted perceptions of random objects or patterns). If you’ve ever looked up at clouds in the sky and seen ships or cats or capering clowns, then you’ve been engaging in pareidolia.

A lot of space photos lend themselves to some wonderful flights of imagination. One of my favorites is the Eskimo Nebula.

Hubble Space Telescope took this image of a planetary nebula that only started to look like this about 10,000 years ago. It was a sun-like star, and in another 10,000 years it may look very different, as the wisps of its atmosphere continue to spread out through space.

That’s part of the beauty of pareidolia—it has an essentially fleeting quality. Wait long enough and the thing you thought you saw, like the ship in the clouds, goes away as the cloud dissipates. Wait long enough (in cosmic time) and the Chinese Dragon and the Eskimo will go away, too. Enjoy ’em while you can!