As amateur astronomers we all look up at the sky, but as human beings when we look we tend to see what we've been trained or told to recognise. Astronomical objects, especially the bigger or brighter nebulae commonly carry "nicknames". 
While some are pretty obvious - NGC 281 "PacMan" for example - others defy explanation, such as NGC 1491 in Perseus : "The Fossil Footprint". But many DSO names were attributed by visual astronomers using eyepieces and classical optical scopes. Since then, amateur astronomy has moved into the digital realm with dedicated astronomy cameras, high performance filters and optically fast, relatively small telescopes with excellent optics capable of delivering very wide fields of view. So our perspective on the stars has evolved.

When it comes to observing (mostly from my Bortle 9 backyard in downtown Ottawa), I'm a fan of Electronically Assisted Astronomy (EAA), using a camera to Live Stack about 30 x 20-30 second frames and watching the image develop on-screen over a period of no more than 10 minutes. So I have time to look at the target object as it develops on-screen and to ask myself if it really looks like what the astronomy literature tells me it should.

But here's the question I'm asking in this presentation : "Does what I think I see in a DSO reflect more on the object ... or on me as a person ?". In other words, are DSOs the astronomical equivalent of the ink-blots in a psychologist's Rorschach test ?

How would you perform on an astronomical Rorschach test ? Let's find out ... with a few selected examples drawn from my more recent archive of images. This will be fast because the Rorschach test is based on flash-cards and instantaneous reaction.
​Lets start with something easy : NGC 7380, the Wizard Nebula in Cepheus. Not only do I not see a "Wizard" ... I just see a galactic cloud and nothing else. Jim Thompson has tried to show me the Wizard several times, but I just do not get it. I guess there's no hope for me on this one !
However, I'm not completely devoid of imagination. Here's the Veil supernova remanaent in Cygnus. I can see the Witch's Broom in the West (right), and Pickering's Triangle … But I'm fixated on the Eastern part (left) which to me is a dead-ringer for the face of the Alien from Ridley Scott's movie of the same name.

Tell me you don't see the Alien looking toward the East !

So ... let's look at some more DSOs : what do you think you see ?

​No more text from me ... !
Hint : I see a maple leaf !!!
Now, next time you are looking at a nebula, let your imagination roam free ! There's lots of opportunity out there. Consider the Sharpless 2 catalogue of bright nebulae : most of them have no "names" to date, yet they should have (in my opinion, of course).

Maybe your  spontaneous reaction to them will provide a new, definitive monicker ?

​You could become famous ?