The following image of a ‘whale’ was posted by Moon Zoo user
Tom128 on 9th December 2010 in the
TLP Project - Ina-like Features thread.
It is located south-east of Maclear crater at approximate coordinates 9.26 N, 21.5 E.
from strip:
M111456730LETom theorised that the region surrounding the ‘whale’ has a thin, brittle coating of lava that flowed over a harder surface and is now easily broken by impacts. There are areas around the ‘whale’ that appear to show broken regolith - see the TLP Project link above for images.
I think the ‘whale’ formation shows similarities to the Hyginus crater formations and could be an irregular sunken depression. The following image shows some of the formations from Hyginus crater. See
TLP Project - Notched Cavities in Lava for more details.
Hyginus Crater floor - zoomed out. Strip:
M104476560LCWe humans are pattern matching animals; we find patterns in nature and in our environment and are specially good at finding faces in mundane objects, e.g. the face of mother Teresa in a piece of toast or a dragon in the clouds. This is known as
Pareidolia and/or
Apophenia.
If you look carefully at the first image above, you can see that the whale has swallowed a dog! (Hopefully not Eric! ((an inside joke))).
Below the whale I found a butterfly (or maybe a fairy!)
Strip:
M142123174RCThe Bad Astronomy blog (written by Phil Plait) has an excellent article on pareidolia, sparked by Phil Plait finding an image of Lenin on his shower curtain one morning:
Image of LeninIf you find an image that looks like a face, animal, plant or anything interesting, you can post it in the
Pareidolia - seeing what isn’t there topic.
