Near full disk image from the ISR Mars Orbiter. Reposted from the ISR Facebook page.

I’m giving huge kudos to the Indian Space Research Organization for their successful insertion of their Mars Orbiter into Martian Orbit at 46,000 miles or 74,500 kilometers.  This is no mean feat, and a lot of credit also has to go to the heroic French mathematicians of the eighteenth and nineteenth century, who made all of this possible.

Now less than a week after the insertion the spacecraft has captured a beautiful gibbous portrait of the Red Planet, capturing a massive dust storm and in true egalitarian form posted it to the ISR’s Facebook Page. I’ve reposted it here as Figure 1. Wait a minute and look just left of center in the image.  Saurabh Gupta wrote in a comment to the posting, “OMG, India map on Mars!”

Well, deja vu! We have another wonderful pareidolia. It’s all a testament to the way that the human mind seeks to see familiar and recognizable paterns. This in turn essentially creates a whole genre of photographs.