Observing ~Physiology or Psychology

[SiriusB]

I'm sure many of you have experienced this:

You've never seen an astronomical object or feature before. You see it for first time in an aperature of X mm.

Subsequently you are often able to see it in smaller apertures.

What exactly is going on?

Are you training your eyes?

Are you seeing what you know 'should' be there?

Does the brain subconciously fill in the detail from memory?

Or is it any combination of the above or something completely different.

Just to give a couple of examples for nearly 30 years i'd never seen the GRS or the veil nebula. (I still view GRS as my nemesis 🙂)

Cue Kelling Heath 10 yrs or so back, I had a mere 80mm with me,  someone showed me both in a 150 ST.

I was subsequently able to see both straight afterwards in my humble 80mm.

Another example.

Seeing m57 as a ring with a fainter core, i used to need 120mm to see, seems obvious (if overall fainter) in a 70mm now.

 

So what exactly is going on?

I know my eyes & sky conditions aren't improving with time.

Just curious.

As an aside,

I'm sure too a small scope may have put many off Astronomy in the past, but i think for a 'seasoned' observer they can help hone your observing skills?

Aperture can make you lazy if you haven't learned to appreciate it perhaps??

Welcome your thoughts.

 

 

 

[sputniksteve]

It's a bit like with Neowise the other week. Or with something like M31 -- once you've seen it in binos or a scope it's easier to see it with the naked eye. I suspect it's  probably a combination of the things you've outlined. 

[SiriusB]

Ps. still working on my spelling. 😉 Should be "Psychology" in the title~ I should know, did a year's evening course in it. Doh!!!!

[mikeDnight]

The famous british lunar observer Harold Hill used a 6.25" Newtonian back in the 1940's to observe the Moon. In the 1980's he used a 10" F10 Newtonian. Then he had opportunity to observe once again with his 6.25" and was surprised that although fainter, he could see all the same detail in the smaller scope that his experienced eye could see in his 10". I'm sure there were things visible in the 10" that would not have been visible in the 6.25", but these were of little consequence.  A few nights ago I was trying out a new eyepiece while looking at M13 through my 8" F6 reflector. The globular cluster was nicely presented with spider like stellar tendrils extending from its core. Stars in the centre were nicely resolved and set against a nebulous backdrop as the deep core wasn't fully resolved.  I then placed the same eyepiece in my 100mm refractor, aimed it at M13 and with the exception of a slightly dimmer image, saw the same beautifully resolved globular with the same nebulous backdrop and stellar tendrils. In fact the 100mm refractor gave a more pleasing image. Similarly, with the exception of brightness, the views of M57 and M27  were in no way inferior in the 100mm.   I know others enjoy or may even need the added brightness of the larger aperture, as the greatest variable is the observer, and our eyes are not all alike. For me however, a good quality small aperture scope never fails to wow me.

Edited September 15, 2020 by mikeDnight

[mikeDnight]

28 minutes ago, SiriusB said:

Ps. still working on my spelling. 😉 Should be "Psychology" in the title~ I should know, did a year's evening course in it. Doh!!!!

A years evening course in psychology is practically a PHD in the subject. I wouldn't worry about spelling either. I just blame the spell check incorrectly correcting my incorrect spelling, and who knows if its true? ☺

[wulfrun]

First let me say I'm by no means an expert on this, more than happy to be told I'm wrong. I suspect it's a lot to do with memory and allowing you to concentrate better since you know what to look for and you know it's there. There are numerous everyday examples. Let's say you find a blemish on an object, such as a small mark on your carpet or a tiny scratch on the paintwork of your prized scope/car/etc. Once you've seen it, you can't unsee it. Chances are, no-one else will ever notice said mark - unless you point it out. The brain is really good at these things.

The brain and memory are also good at making things up. Try this one, it's pretty well-known: give a friend several different coloured pens or pencils and have them stand behind you. Look at an object straight in front of you and do not avert your view. Ask the friend to pick a pen/pencil at random and bring it, slowly, into your peripheral vision. When it enters the very edge of your vision, your retina is incapable of determining the colour. Now take a very quick peek directly, so you know the colour. Look back ahead and that pen/pencil is now, miraculously, in the correct colour - despite the fact that your retina cannot see the colour. Your brain now knows and fills in the colour detail. Large parts of your field vision is not in colour but you are totally unaware of it - you scan a scene and your brain remembers much of the details.

[jetstream]

One is object recognition which comes from repetition- I go over and over targets for this reason. Once the initial object recognition sets in other features will become visible if its within the grasp of the scope and observer.

Another thing- the brain might "store" visual data, triggered by repetition. Just guess.

@wulfrun question: Heres a map of the Veil. At the top of the eastern Veil tip there is a very faint detached patch- that Ive been viewing for years. Another if you look really close is a thin thread just to the left of it- some say theoretically impossible. I "discovered" these 2 features which then sent me over to a couple of imager colleagues to confirm as not many images show it.

Thoughts?

Edited September 18, 2020 by jetstream

[wulfrun]

31 minutes ago, jetstream said:

One is object recognition which comes from repetition- I go over and over targets for this reason. Once the initial object recognition sets in other features will become visible if its within the grasp of the scope and observer.

Another thing- the brain might "store" visual data, triggered by repetition. Just guess.

@wulfrun question: Heres a map of the Veil. At the top of the eastern Veil tip there is a very faint detached patch- that Ive been viewing for years. Another if you look really close is a thin thread just to the left of it- some say theoretically impossible. I "discovered" these 2 features which then sent me over to a couple of imager colleagues to confirm as not many images show it.

Thoughts?

Just to reiterate, I'm not an expert so I'm just applying logic to what knowledge I do have. I'd suggest that you have a) exceptional eyesight or b) exceptional equipment -  or both! Beyond that, I only have guesswork and I tend not to use that when possible.

[jetstream]

23 minutes ago, wulfrun said:

Just to reiterate, I'm not an expert so I'm just applying logic to what knowledge I do have. I'd suggest that you have a) exceptional eyesight or b) exceptional equipment -  or both! Beyond that, I only have guesswork and I tend not to use that when possible.

I have a genuine interest in this and any ideas are appreciated.

I see nebula much easier than galaxies but others pickout tiny smudge flicks easier than myself. Eyesight- I wonder how this really works- I think but don't know that the brain is doing more than we realize.

I see pink and blue in M42- but- a physicist and optics expert say this is an illusion based on whatever. It might be true- but the illusion is in the right color for the light wavelengths, very puzzling.

 

[Martin Meredith]

I'm not a vision expert but I work in speech perception and there are many demos of the brain filling in information based on what ought to be there. In fact, this is the normal mode of operation and not at all exceptional (think about the way we perceive conversations in noise: at the level of the signal reaching the ears, lots of information is already masked and has to be filled in, either explicitly or as a side-effect of recognising what was being said).

There's a famous illusion called the phoneme restoration effect where an entire sound is chopped out of the signal and replaced by noise, and listeners swear the sound is present. In a sense it is present, in the same way that a sculpture is present in a cube of marble (indeed, if the noise is not loud enough the illusion doesn't work).

The brain appears to employ Occam's razor: of several competing explanations, choose the simplest that is compatible with the sensory evidence. its a bit old now, but the philosopher Daniel Dennett's book Consciousness Explained has some interesting ideas about the difference between sensation and interpretation and the huge hap between the way we imagine the brain operating and what is is (possibly) actually doing.

I guess the boring way to answer the question would be for a psychologist to stand at the end of the scope generating control images where the feature of interest is excised and the observer has to report whether it is present or not. This would be very hard to do properly in the photon-starved, variable-seeing astronomical context because the sensory signal is continually changing.

I run into the same issue when I'm trying to decide whether I've detected some faint feature on photos, but at least there we can measure the SNR and apply some kind of criterion for detection.

Martin

[jetstream]

3 hours ago, Martin Meredith said:

I'm not a vision expert but I work in speech perception and there are many demos of the brain filling in information based on what ought to be there.

Excellent and thank you for the information.

Question to you or anyone else- can the brain fill in information if it doesn't know what it should fill in?

The fill in explanation was one of the ideas tossed around seeing pink and blue in M42. I see pink from 200mm f3.8-15" f4.8 and pink and blue in the 24". I did not see pink at first in these scopes it was after many repeated observations. I did immediately see pink and also blue in the 24".

I think I'm going to buy the book Consciousness Explained.

I'm also thinking that after repeated observation something happens I'm just not sure what but I always view view view a target object and after this it seems easier and with more detail.

Edited September 18, 2020 by jetstream

[andrew s]

5 minutes ago, jetstream said:

Question to you or anyone else- can the brain fill in information if it doesn't know what it should fill in?

It maybe a false memory but I recall reading that an isolated tribe could not "see" photographs of themselves as they had no 2D representations of the 3D world in their culture.

Regards Andrew

[jetstream]

9 minutes ago, andrew s said:

It maybe a false memory but I recall reading that an isolated tribe could not "see" photographs of themselves as they had no 2D representations of the 3D world in their culture.

Regards Andrew

Excellent.

I'm puzzled by the whole thing- take the Crescent nebula. With no filter I see pretty much the same curved spike around 3 stars- all the time. I have observed it with filters that will show very fine filaments in the center. Why doesn't my brain fill this in with no filter? Btw the 24" shows more of everything- some hints of filaments no filter and massive structure with.

Again, anyones input is greatly welcomed.

Edited September 18, 2020 by jetstream

[Stu]

Very interesting topic @SiriusB. I don’t know the answers to any of it, but do think there is a heck of a lot of ‘brain’ involvement in what we see. I know that a number of targets I’ve looked at over the years have started out as impossible, and then once seen they become easier each time. I find this with double stars too, Zeta Herc was my nemesis for a long time, but finally, on a night of excellent seeing, I clearly saw it in my Mewlon 210, and soon after in the 8” f8 (might have been the other way around, can’t recall). After that I spotted it more easily, and have subsequently seen it in my Vixen FL102S and Tak FC100DC whereas previously I had found it impossible in these scopes.

Another experience I’ve had has been with binoviewers. I think I’m on my 6th or 7th pair now (I have two pairs).  It has taken me a number of years of trying different models and literally training my brain to get to a stage where I feel I’m getting the best out of them and now use nothing else for solar white light and Ha, and prefer them for lunar observing.

Objects like the Veil are fascinating and over the years I’ve viewed it in a variety of scopes, and have likely seen more each time. My feeling is more that this is just building experience though, and having better opportunities to view it. My best ever was with the 14” Sumerian Alkaid down on the Pembroke coast last year. I was able to identify features I’d not seen before, such as the Thin Thread, following that all the way from Pickering’s Wisp across past the feature labelled I on the image posted by Gerry. This was all about a cracking scope under excellent skies I think, but it is definitely a feature I would explore in future under similar circumstances and would likely see it more easily. Fascinating stuff.

[JeremyS]

2 hours ago, andrew s said:

It maybe a false memory but I recall reading that an isolated tribe could not "see" photographs of themselves as they had no 2D representations of the 3D world in their culture.

Regards Andrew

Isn’t that teenagers and mobile phones Andrew?
:-)

 

[JamesF]

2 minutes ago, JeremyS said:

Isn’t that teenagers and mobile phones Andrew?

Other way around.  They don't realise that the world is actually 3d, only ever having experience of 2d images of it

James

[scarp15]

22 minutes ago, Stu said:

Very interesting topic @SiriusB. I don’t know the answers to any of it, but do think there is a heck of a lot of ‘brain’ involvement in what we see. I know that a number of targets I’ve looked at over the years have started out as impossible, and then once seen they become easier each time. I find this with double stars too, Zeta Herc was my nemesis for a long time, but finally, on a night of excellent seeing, I clearly saw it in my Mewlon 210, and soon after in the 8” f8 (might have been the other way around, can’t recall). After that I spotted it more easily, and have subsequently seen it in my Vixen FL102S and Tak FC100DC whereas previously I had found it impossible in these scopes.

Another experience I’ve had has been with binoviewers. I think I’m on my 6th or 7th pair now (I have two pairs).  It has taken me a number of years of trying different models and literally training my brain to get to a stage where I feel I’m getting the best out of them and now use nothing else for solar white light and Ha, and prefer them for lunar observing.

Objects like the Veil are fascinating and over the years I’ve viewed it in a variety of scopes, and have likely seen more each time. My feeling is more that this is just building experience though, and having better opportunities to view it. My best ever was with the 14” Sumerian Alkaid down on the Pembroke coast last year. I was able to identify features I’d not seen before, such as the Thin Thread, following that all the way from Pickering’s Wisp across past the feature labelled I on the image posted by Gerry. This was all about a cracking scope under excellent skies I think, but it is definitely a feature I would explore in future under similar circumstances and would likely see it more easily. Fascinating stuff.

Yep, accumulated experience, consistent research and evaluation on different targets and going back to them time and time again over many seasons and the main ingredient dark and transparent skies.

It is perhaps more of an attitude that shapes the way we see, that can fine tune our senses to be receptive to a specific subject. As an example, a plumber or an electrician can enter a building and they will through their professional experience and training, mentally see all the pipe works, electrical circuits that to ordinary people are hidden. Another example, when I was studying visual art at college, I would consistently pass by the everyday urban things and would subconsciously be mentally inquiring an aspect of somethings proportion, relationship to objects around it, kind of drawing it with my eye, simply because that's what I was doing everyday at college. If we become conditioned to something, then our minds eye will allow us to visually register that something that we are adept at pursuing. 

Increased visual integrity is also a product of the interactions on forums such as this, problem solving, resolving, clarifying. It is then possible to grasp an enhanced perception of a subject and that subject may gradually over time transform to become more vivid. A classic example is the Horsehead Nebula, my first encounter was with an experienced observer who could see it and even said that it is the best view he had ever had of it and through my scope, which of course I was accustomed to. However, could I and a club colleague with me see it, no it was invisible never mind the best view ever. A few years later and it has become straight forward, with an applied technique that is dependable and visually sincere. 

[Martin Meredith]

On 18/09/2020 at 22:07, jetstream said:

Excellent and thank you for the information.

Question to you or anyone else- can the brain fill in information if it doesn't know what it should fill in?

 

The honest answer is that we don't know how this works, but we have some hints from experimental studies as well as some ideas from computer modelling as to how it might work. I stress these are just my opinions based on published studies (mine and others') over the last 20 years or so.

One key finding is that viewers and listeners do not in general hallucinate. Any filling in must be entirely compatible with the sensory evidence. Any counter-evidence can immediately kill off an erroneous interpretation. I've seen this in my own work involving work misperceptions in noise. When the noise is information-less and acts just to mask portions of the word rather than contributing any linguistic information itself, listeners do tend to fall back on prior knowledge when forced to guess what the word is (we see this because they choose more familiar words, so are applying knowledge about how likely different words are to be present). But when the noise itself contains speech information (e.g. competing speech babble), then listeners' misperceptions are not based on word familiarity but turn out to be words that could possibly have occurred by gluing together fragments of the background babble. There are other experiments that show that when interpreting phrases in noise we rely more on acoustic information than prior knowledge when noise is present (the opposite of what one might expect). That is, we are straining to find any reliable 'real' evidence and weight it very highly in the decision process. 

So in the battle between sensory data and prior expectations, sensory data will always win out. Expectations are perhaps best thought of as biases which will only get used when the incoming sensory data is absolutely ambiguous, noisy or lacking -- something that we find a lot when observing DSOs and the like! Sometimes we have a glimpse into the form of these expectations when we cut off sensory input altogether, as during dreaming.

The 'no hallucination' principle suggests that during observation, we are indeed reporting what is there or what is compatible with the evidence of our eyes, while at the same time we may be able to make an interpretational 'leap' from poor sensory evidence to what experience tells us is there. In the case of say the GRS, it may not take many photons in the right place to suggest that the feature is present. It is surprising how little sensory data we need to make accurate judgements, and how much experience helps. (Off-topic, but I have recently been working with a form of distorted speech which actually contains no speech at all but is carved out of music; with experience listeners go from identifying 4 out of every 10 words correctly to 6 or 7).

Another thing to realise is that filling in ('imputation' as it is sometimes called) is not a one-shot process. There is the potential for filling in at many (dozens) of points during the processing of a visual or auditory scene. Observers might fill in pixel-level intensity details based on simple spatial neighbourhood criteria, and at the same time be making mid-level interpretations about the continuity say of a feature such as a line when it is occluded by another feature, amongst others. One property of neural processing is the existence of connections in both directions i.e. not just an upwards flow to match the process of interpretations, but downward flow too. We know much less about the downward connections, but hypothesise that they serve to normalise, stabilise or regularise the upward flowing information. It is probable that these represent also the mechanism of 'filling in'.

So to come to the crunch question, how can the brain fill in information if it doesn't know what to fill in? The key word here is 'know' and the question is really: how do we know what the brain really 'knows'? Every time incoming data is processed, it has the potential to alter the state of what the brain knows, and this is most likely taking place both continuously and in a distributed fashion i.e. at each processing level. For instance, the brain may be learning about most-likely local intensity gradients at the lower levels of processing, about line continuity at the mid-levels, about continuity of shade, shape, outlines etc, but also learning about any form of statistical regularity. I'm sure that some of these regularities are quite abstract and high-level, and enriched by increasing experience. A lunar observer's brain will have different expectations than an experienced observer of Mars, for instance. Experience in a sense is just the distributed accretion of sensory data and its subsequent representation in the brain.

Most of the evidence we have is circumstantial and based on computational models. How sense data can best be combined with existing knowledge to produced updated knowledge is one of the main challenges of modern machine-learning. The latest and by far most successful wave of artificial intelligence is entirely based on probabilistic learning in multilayer neural models ('deep networks') which may be pretty good analogues of the distributed processing of information in the brain. One thing we can do with deep networks is turn them on their head and get them to generate scenes or sounds -- in a sense, asking them to explain (or better said, to exemplify) what they have learnt. Visualisation techniques of this kind are still in their infancy but there have been some attempts to show what has been acquired: a good example is Google's DeepDream https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeepDream In principle it would be possible to train a deep network on the kind of observations that reflect what astronomers observe and determine what regularities have been extracted -- we might be surprised. 

Not sure any of this gets us closer to answering the question, but we are still in a (very) early state of understanding the brain.

cheers

Martin

[jetstream]

2 hours ago, Martin Meredith said:

while at the same time we may be able to make an interpretational 'leap' from poor sensory evidence to what experience tells us is there

Thank you so much for this information Martin. I have realized for a few years that there is something going on that enhances (or whatever we can call it) observations.It might be something like "based on my (brain) experiences this little hint of something should be a nebula" or whatever.  What amazes me is that my own experience has never shown me something that isn't there or in reasonably correct form. However I think we all see some things differently- an example- the Pleiades Bubble. Mel Bartels has a sketch of this feature that I tried to see and now see regularly, but I don't see it exactly like Mel... an observing colleague, an astro writer confirmed my observation as I described it years ago. I do see some individual features like Mel and others but the object as a whole I (we) see a bit differently. Bottom line there is definitely something there and I guess our brains through our own experiences fill things in or whatever. Whatever the case this object is one of the most beautiful features of the sky as described by me and some others.

Last night I viewed the Little Veil SH2-91 immediately and after a bit a ghostly trace of a line appeared above it- another section of this object. While obs the area a lot in the past I havn't for a year or so and did not look at images first, this I did later. My observation of its appearance was correct according to the images, strange stuff indeed.

What I am truly interested in is any techniques that might enhance this ability to observe, fill in or what ever we want to call it.

2 hours ago, Martin Meredith said:

(Off-topic, but I have recently been working with a form of distorted speech which actually contains no speech at all but is carved out of music; with experience listeners go from identifying 4 out of every 10 words correctly to 6 or 7).

I am intrigued by this ^^^ can I do this for DSO ? if so how?

Best Regards, Gerry

[Martin Meredith]

Hi Gerry

I'm not sure I can offer much in the way of techniques but I'm going to throw this into the mix in case it is of interest:

One technique we use in experimental studies is pupillometry (essentially, measuring the size of the pupil using an eye-tracker). It has been found that if the brain is engaged in a cognitively-demanding task (in our case trying to extract speech from noise or other talkers), the mean pupil size increases. Its a small effect though and is somewhat transient. I have my doubts about whether it would help in observing, but who knows? There are lots of ways to increase cognitive load while observing that are more pleasant than listening to speech in noise. You could listen to polyphonic music and try to track one of the instruments, for instance. I'm pretty sure it would interfere with the pleasure of observing pretty quickly, but it might be worth a try!

The main implication of the 'carving speech from music' example I gave is as a demonstration that neural processing is reconfigurable over the course of seconds and minutes. Some of the forms of distorted speech I use are very far removed from what real speech looks like, so the brain has had no prior experience of them, yet listeners are able to extract meaning after relatively short periods of exposure. What this might mean for observations I'm not sure but there is the possibility that other forms of visual expertise may have a positive impact on observing, if observing can piggy-back on the structures that this other (non-astronomical) visual expertise has put into place. I think this supports the point made by Iain (Scarp). There are lots of studies showing the benefits that musicians have in some speech tasks, for instance. For observers, there could be other ways to develop this kind of complementary visual expertise e.g. microscopy.

Cheers

Martin

[jetstream]

4 hours ago, Martin Meredith said:

increase cognitive load

I usually go from memory when observing, getting the "map in my head" before going out, but the Sky Commander makes things so easy I wonder if its a detriment? I do have to remember all the designators I program in though.

From years past I practised object recognition from hunting- identifying animal shapes and shades at dusk. I must add our hunting is nothing like UK hunting.Another thing that might have helped is pre GPS navigation on the lake at night, going by the shape of the tree lines. Not sure but in my case large indistinct shapes are easier for me to see.

I'm just curious about all this - I can see the Pelicans head as a Pelican and also the Running Man figure easily raising eyebrows at times lol!

Cognitive load, I'm going to check this out for observing.

[andrew s]

Just read the thread title "Sun today Sept 21st" as "Sunday Sept 21st" .

Was I expecting a day before a date, did I just look at the ends and miss the " to".

Who knows. I just felt myself thinking its not Sunday so somewhere I must have registered the "today".

Mind blowing or stupidity on my part.

Regards Andrew 

[SiriusB]

Thanks to all for your input.

Some very thought provoking replies, I feel i've learned something.

.....& to whomever corrected the title. 👍😉

 

Edited September 21, 2020 by SiriusB
to add another thankyou