When you build and launch a high-resolution solar observatory that stares at the Sun 24 hours a day, you’re bound to catch some pretty cool stuff. As proof, check out this video of a stunning prominence erupting from the Sun’s surface on July 12, 2011, as seen by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory:

[Make sure you set the resolution to at least 720p.]

That’s really graceful, especially considering that tower reached the staggering height of about 150,000 km (90,000 miles) above the Sun in just a few minutes!

The gas on the Sun is ionized, which means it’s had one or more electrons ripped away from its atoms. Technically called a plasma, this makes it sensitive to the Sun’s strong magnetic forces. That becomes really obvious after it starts to collapse; it doesn’t follow a ballistic trajectory like you’d expect (the path a ball thrown up in the air would follow), but instead flows along the Sun’s magnetic field lines. This video is in the ultraviolet, where such a plasma glows brightly.

For a moment there, just at its peak, it coincidentally looks like a classic angel with wings spread. Of course, once the angel dissolves it forms more of an arc… so I guess this makes it an archangel. I’m glad no one heard a trumpet playing when this happened. That could’ve been awkward.

Credit: NASA/SDO

I glanced out my office window the other day and saw what is clearly a sign that the weather is ticked off about something:

Go cloud! Punch that sky!

I was thinking at first the cloud was the result of a big convective updraft; warm air screaming upwards and forming a puffy column. A couple of weeks ago I saw this happen in a ginormous cumulonimbus storm cloud. There were several rapidly rising columns of air moving up so quickly they were forming pilei, which are caps of water vapor that look like little shock waves at the top of the cloud.

However, when I was looking at this fist cloud just a few minutes later as it blew east toward my house, I saw this was just a perspective effect, and it was just a normal puffy cloud.

Too bad. I was getting into it. Give it to the man! Fight the stratus quo!

This is a pretty nifty illusion: as you look at a spot between two rapidly changing images of faces, your brain distorts the images, making them look really weird:

I could do without the title they chose for the video, but the paper on which it’s based is called "Flashed face distortion effect: Grotesque faces from relative spaces", which may not explain much, either. What it means, basically, is that as the faces flash, certain features get distorted by your brain, and the amount of distortion depends on how much that feature deviates from the rest in the set. In other words, someone with slightly larger eyes gets perceived by you as having huge eyes. Go ahead and pause the video and click through it; the faces are pretty much normal faces, so the distortion really is an illusion.

I think that’s pretty neat; I’m fascinated by how our brains perceive faces in particular, since people see them everywhere. I’d love to see some variations on this, like showing men’s faces, or a man on one side and a woman on the other. Would it work for animal faces too? Hmmm.

I’ll note that some people have a hard time seeing this illusion; my friend Richard Wiseman — who knows a thing or two on how the brain can be fooled! — doesn’t see it well. Do you?

Tip o’ the Nacker cube to Gizmodo and my old friend Bill Dalton.

It’s very common to see familiar things in random patterns. We see faces in clouds, Jesus in a tortilla, and smiley faces everywhere. It’s so ubiquitous there’s a term for it: pareidolia.

So when I saw on reddit that people were talking about seeing an epic dragon fight in the Orion Nebula, I smiled. But then I saw the image, and that smile turned to pure amazement. Why? Because here’s the image:

[Click to ensmaugenate.]

Do you see the dragon on the left, wings outstretched, breathing fire, blasting it at the man on the right? He has a face, and I see his shoulder, back, and outstretched arm as well, as if he’s battling the dragon.

Let me be clear: this picture is real! Well, the dragon and face aren’t real — they’re more pareidolia — but the images in the nebula are actually there. You might see them more easily in this contrast-enhanced version, too.

Let me explain…

(more…)

Pareidolia is the psychological term for seeing patterns in random or near-random distributions of things. The Face on Mars, the Man in the Moon, Jesus in a taco shell, and so on… most of the time it manifests as faces, since our brains are geared to recognize them as easily as possible.

But sometimes you get other patterns too. I don’t know about you, but I agree with astronomer Yurii Pidopryhora: this is a dolphin:

It’s actually a cold molecular gas cloud about 25,000 light years away in our galaxy, seen in the radio part of the spectrum. I don’t have much to say, except

1) If that dolphin’s swimming, it must be in liquid helium and not water — note the temperature scale on the right; and

b) Too bad this is in the constellation of Scutum the shield; it should really be in Delphinus.

Image credit: Yurii Pidopryhora (JIVE)

Mrs. BA and I have spent the last week in Europe, on a Center for Inquiry-sponsored cruise with fellow critical thinkers. I’ll post more later, but yesterday we flew across 8 time zones, arriving home late last night. My body thinks it’s 2:00 in the morning yesterday, or perhaps tomorrow — I was calling the time zone confusion "yestermorrow" on the trip — and I’m a wee bit messed up. So instead of some big post about astronomy or Doctor Who or the latest attack on reality, here is a funny picture of a mail slot/intercom (I think) I saw in a narrow alleyway (as they all are) in Venice.

I think it’s a robot saying, "Meh." If you know what it actually is, please leave a comment. I’ll be sleeping until the day before yesterday.

[UPDATE: In the comments, people are asking about the odd lighting in the picture. I did not use a flash (which would have made the shadows distinct and sharp). The alley I was in - as are all of the Venetian alleys - is tall and narrow, with limited sunlight coming from above. We were not near a canal at the time. I can't remember the precise conditions, but I suspect quite a bit of the light was coming from the alleyway surface itself, which is why it looks lit from below. In a sense, it is!]

It’s Caturday, and I have decided to expand my definition once again to include not just animals but also things that aren’t alive that look like things that are alive.

So I present to you angry slippers yelling at you:

What are they yelling about?

• "C’mon, man, wash your feet first!"
• "Keep us off the cold tile floor you jerk!"
• "Store us next to those yakkity flip-flops again and we’ll make sure the cat leaves you a ‘present’ before you stick your feet in us next time!"
• "We’re a pair of slippers, not a pareidolia of slippers!"
• "Wear socks with us again and we swear we’re calling Stacey London!"

These slippers were a gift from my mother-in-law to The Little Astronomer, which just goes to show you the world’s a pretty funny place if you keep your eyes open and sense of humor primed.