Halloween is an amazing chance for people to be someone (or something) they have always wanted to be. To step outside of their norm and live their life as an alter ego, if only for one night. This is why so many people have crazy Halloween stories, and why the ‘holiday’ captivates us so much. With humanity’s excellent pattern recognition skills, we tend to see spooky things in space, where if you would just turn the picture 90 degrees, it probably would look like some other item from human experience, and not be spooky after all. Here are a few great Halloween shots gaining some steam this year.
The witch head nebula. I can only ever remember seeing this picture creep up on Halloween. Any other day of the year it is an ordinary reflection nebula, but it gets all the attention on October 31st.
Haunted House and Star trails. A spooky occurrence that requires a camera trick to actually witness, star trails show how stars appear to move over time due to the Earth’s rotation. With a haunted house and a jack-o-lantern as a foreground, this shot came out beautifully.
The ‘dead comet’ skull asteroid 2015 TB145, discovered by a colleague of mine, 400 metres across in this radar image. It looks like a spooky skull, and it said hello to Earth last night by passing just a bit further away than the Moon, but otherwise its pretty unremarkable, considering we get ‘buzzed’ by asteroids like this one surprisingly often.