Image | Skull Nebula Is Pure Metal.

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César Cantú took a picture of W5, known as the Soul Nebula. However, through a variety of imaging filters, he managed to reveal the nebula’s true friggin’ nature: as the most metal of nebula, the Skull Nebula.

Bad Astronomy:

Pretty, isn’t it? It was taken by César Cantú, an amateur astronomer in Mexico. It’s not a true color picture. Not even close! For one thing, he used three filters which let through extremely narrow wavelengths of light (that is, the filters reject all light except for a very thin range of wavelengths; I’ve written about them before). Our eyes see broad ranges of colors, so immediately these filters change the very nature of the picture. Different atoms in space emit at different colors, and the filters he chose select for hydrogen, oxygen, and sulfur, which tend to emit light very strongly in gas clouds.
Not only that, he mixed and matched the colors. The hydrogen filter lets through red light, but he colored it green in the picture; oxygen is usually green but he made it blue*; and sulfur is red which he actually did color red. This throws off my usual sense of what I’m seeing in a picture (I really am used to hydrogen being red and oxygen green) so it forces me to re-evaluate how I see this gas cloud.

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And I can’t help but laugh at the funny irony here: in the Spitzer image, W5 looks like a classic valentine, a heart. But in César’s picture it looks like a skull! It even has glowing eyes, like something right out of Halloween. Talk about contrast. The more I look at it, the creepier it gets. Yikes.

Of course, there’s science here. Stars are forming in this region of space, and the glowing eyes of the skull are actually where newborn stars are blowing strong winds and emitting fierce amounts of ultraviolet light. That acts to carve cavities in the gas, making what look like the eye sockets. In fact, the whole outline of the nebula is shaped by the winds from those stars.
So I guess there are many ways to see this same object: different filters, different colors for those filters, different wavelengths, different body parts as interpretations of the shape, and thinking scientifically instead of pareidoliacally. Which I think isn’t a word, but maybe is now.

Cantú is a true Info Warrior, exposing the machinations of the Cosmo-Lord, the most metal of enterprising universal  fascists. He lurks in deep space, within his Skull Nebula, plotting his entrance into galactic domination.

Or it’s probably just an amazing picture and photo manipulation.