NASA shared this image of clouds and storms on Jupiter that resemble a face. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS Image processing by Vladimir Tarasov
The folks at NASA not only explore space and do the other cool stuff they do, they’ve also got a great sense of timing.
The agency shared this photo of what looks like a creepy face on Jupiter just in time for Halloween. Boo!
Vladimir Tarasov made the image using publicly available data from JunoCam, part of the Juno spacecraft currently orbiting Jupiter, the largest planet in our solar system. The craft, NASA writes, was about 4,800 miles (7,725 kilometers) from Jupiter’s clouds when the data were collected Sept. 7. The region imaged is at 69° north, highlighting Juno’s unique mission to study the planet’s polar regions, rather than just the area near its equator.
The “face” in the image is not really a face, of course. It is made up of turbulent clouds and storms photographed right at the interface of day and night, called the terminator (the dividing line between light and dark on the image). Have you ever looked at a cloud in the sky and thought it looked like a dog, a cat, or a face? That’s called pareidolia, a scientific term that describes how our minds can make us think we see faces and patterns in otherwise random things.
The “face” that Tarasov found looks a lot like a character from a classic Twilight Zone episode, the CBS anthology television show created by Rod Serling that is still popular today. Both “The Eye of the Beholder” and “The Masks” include characters that look a lot like that face on Jupiter:
A screenshot from the Twilight Zone episode “The Masks.” Credit: @thetwilightzone5030/YouTube
There could be other faces or objects waiting to be found in the data from the Juno mission, which arrived at Jupiter July 4, 2016. The JunoCam camera is entirely dedicated to public outreach, with members of the public processing the images using various techniques. NASA makes data available here and has more on its citizen science program here. The images there are more than worthwhile to look at, even if you don’t see a face.
