The moon leaps
In the Great River's current...
Floating on the wind,
What do I resemble?
DU FU,
"Traveling at Night"
(China, Tang Dynasty, 765)
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The Man in the Moon
and other weird things
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page dedicated to the memory of Carl Sagan
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Last updated by Miloslaw Smyk on 2006-12-12.
Newsflash! We're now listed on Wikipedia too!
Some weeks ago I was browsing Carl
Sagan's "The Demon-Haunted World" that my friend had finally returned. I like
to get back to books I found enjoyable on a first reading, and this one was
really delightful. It has a chapter entitled "The Man in the Moon and the
Face on Mars", which deals with popular delusion of Cydonia Face and it was it that I jumped into:
(...)What do we actually see when we look up at the Moon with the naked eye? We
make out a configuration of irregular bright and dark markings - not a
close representation of any familiar object. But, almost irresisitibly, our
eyes connect the markings, emphasizing some, ignoring others. We seek a
pattern, and we find one. In world myth and folklore, many images are
seen: a woman weaving, stands of laurel trees, an elephant jumping off a
cliff, a girl with a basket on her back, a rabbit, the lunar intestines
spilled out on its surface after evisceration by an irritable flightless
bird, a woman pounding tapa cloth, a four-eyed jaguar. People of one
culture have trouble understanding how such bizzare things could be seen by
the people of another.
At this moment I realized this was a good occasion to put to use photos of the Moon
I made with my Uniwersal
150mm telescope (model 8). I quickly grabbed a photo album from a shelf and
began staring at a shot that you can see all over this page. It wasn't long
when shapes began to emerge - from very simple, to complicated and
detailed. I was so moved by my "discovery", that I immediately wanted to
share it with someone and rushed to my neighbors. Together we located
more interesting patterns, including "Young girl" and "The priest".
Below you can see several of our findings. Next to each of them I put a plain
photo of the Moon, so that you can quickly move your eyes from marked to
unretouched photo and locate the pattern yourself. Please bear in mind that
the black "overlays" are not exact copies of the underlying shapes - this was
not my intention. Instead, they are here to tell you where to look and on
which elements to concentrate. When you find them on the unretouched shot,
you'll often realize that they are much more detailed, with delicate shades
and additional features I was not able to render with my crude drawings.
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| The Man in the Moon
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| This is probably the easiest pattern to spot. The face
is cartoon-like, without much shading, but is quite
big and easily noticeable on almost any Moon shot.
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| The pirate
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| The pirate. Well, I called it that way, because this
certainly is a bad face. Faces of
arab sorcerers are being caricatured in a similar way. It
is drawn with thick line, but many details are visible
in the face anyway. You may consider its beard longer
than I indicated in the overlay.
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| Man with head of a lion
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| While the human part of the body isn't very convincing,
please have a look at the head. It's the head of a young
lion, with its eyes, nose and hair clearly visible. The
ears are also in their proper location. Unfortunately, it's
lit from (lion's) left, so its right side is in the shadow.
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| Young girl
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| This is the most beautiful and detailed of the Moon images
I found to date. There is a plenty of features to watch, and if
you stare long enough even individual hairs can be made out.
She's so pretty, if only her left arm wasn't so mutilated...
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| Guy in glasses
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| When I first spotted this guy, I though I'd found Jesus, but
then I noticed that he was wearing glasses... Sorry, no Jesus this time.
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| Face of a lazy dog (but no quick brown fox here ;) )
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| Well, this dog-face is not very detailed, it is missing some
important details and the quality of the overlay is poor.
But it's a dog with big ears anyway.
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| The priest
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| When my friend found this man, he insisted he was a knight, but
careful inspection of man's "hat" revealed that he was rather
a priest (bishop perhaps) of some sort.
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| Grandma (submitted by Marcin Orlowski)
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| This one pictures "Yelling Grandma" (or something similar, but yelling anyway).
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| Closed-eye Egiptian (submitted by Marcin Orlowski)
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| This one shows "Closed-eye Egyptian".
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| Indian (submitted by Dr. Cerebrus)
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| This one's called "The Indian in the moon". According to several Native
American Cultures, the moon depicts an Indian man sitting cross-legged on a
blanket and praying. He must be praying pretty hard for his braids to go
flying like that!
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And this is it for the moment, I hope I managed to get your imagination
started. Please look for other weird things on the Moon
and if you find something extraordinary, send me 186x191
GIF image with your finding overlayed in a way you see on this page, along
with your comments. I'll then put it here and give you a proper credit. The
quote from Sagan mentions many shapes that one could try to find, by the
way.
Here is the Moon image I used for you to download and,
if you need it, original 563x579 Moon shot (JPEG 330KB).
Oldflash:
Images from this site have been featured in
@discovery.ca episode 1192, dated April 19, 2000. You can see RealVideo version
of the show (hint: fast forward 29 minutes into the show).
