Pink and Green

Pink, green

There is no spoon green dot. It’s an afterimage from seeing the pink.

Things to add — if you look away, you’ll see green afterimages. Also, if you stare at any of the pink dots for a while, they (or the rest) will still tend to disappear. When you stare at one point, images can fade, especially if they are dim and away from the point at which you are looking, which is a problem in astronomy — you’re looking at a dim star, and it has a tendency to just disappear. This, I’ve learned, is called Troxler’s fading (the wikipedia page uses this illusion as an example). We normally don’t experience this, because we tend to move our eyes a few times per second.

Update: The “pink, green” link is dead, so try this one : Lilac chaser

Color My World

Cool illusion. Bad Astronomy: The blue and the green

This is why I tell people over and over again: you cannot trust what you see even with your own eyes. Your eyes are not cameras faithfully taking pictures of absolute truth of all that surrounds you. They have filters, and your brain has to interpret the jangled mess it gets fed. Colors are not what they appear, shapes are not what they appear (that zoomed image above is square, believe it or not), objects are not what they appear.

Yeah. Ditto