The eye and perception of reality

People alwayslike to bring forward that what someone sees is a fact... well it is as long as you stay with what you saw and not what your brain made from it. What is told might be largely differ from what was to be seen.

I write this as a mean of understanding how human perception works, as I think the more serious UFO researchers on this board are interested in it and most will already know it. For others this might just be a voyage through their own fascinating brain and how the process of perception takes place.

Those pictures are so impressive because they maintain their delusion even if you know it is one and you can barely fight against it. They achieve that effect because they use the fact that the brain adds information to everything we see as it consideres it most probable and wants to help us. Most are geometric and shapes which is why they work on all humans as the recognition of those is simple and always the same.

One of the most fascinating examples I ever saw... No, this is no animated gif, it is totally static:
http://www.anc.ed.ac.uk/~amos/funpics/rotsnake2.png

Is it broken?
http://www.owlnet.rice.edu/~psyc351/Images/PencilInWater.jpg

Also this image is (I promise) NOT moving, despite your brain telling so:
http://www.picpix.com/brad/pic/005g7gap/s640x480

Now... are there black dots or are there none inside the white circles... they just popp where you do not directly look?
http://www.niehs.nih.gov/kids/illusion/images/image002.jpg

Would you swear these lines are not straight if you would have seen that out of this context?
http://www.pomakis.com/opticalIllusions/cushion5.png

Which center circle is larger?
http://www.bobjude.co.uk/entertain/illusion/circles.gif

What a nice spiral?
http://members.aol.com/kiekeben/illusion.jpg

Umm... stare at the dot in the middle... do you realize something?
http://www.uncg.edu/%7Ewhanthon/illusions/colored-fluff.jpg

Only artificial pictures may defy the eye?
http://www.anc.ed.ac.uk/~amos/funpics/andrus1box1.jpg
http://www.thomasmichaelcorcoran.com/optic...roller%2001.jpg

Have fun

Deep Impact

New Ariane 5 Heavy Lift Launcher Successfully Launched!

The Ariane 5 ECA successfully launched yesterday. This was a very important flight for european space indistry which tries to gain back the trust in the very successful Ariane (Ariane 4) program.

http://www.arianespace.com/site/news/news_...date_index.html

Congratulation guys! Well done! :cheers:

Christmas present: Huygens on the way (graphical content) - Surface pictures

The European part of the Cassini mission is about to enter the interesting phase! It separated on December 25th and is now on the way.
On January 14 the probe Huygens will enter as first spacecraft ever the atmosphere of Titan, one of the moons of Saturn. It will descent and land on the surface to transmit atmospheric and surface composition data at a rate of around 8kBit/s.

A small animation about the reentry of Huygens and the different phases of the mission:
http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/Cassini-Huygen...E4L3AR2E_0.html

Europe arrives at our moon

Today the european probe SMART-1 successfully did its first pass over lunar surface in an altitude of around 5000 km.

http://www.esa.int/esaCP/SEM2S8WJD1E_index_0.html