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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;KBBPLL, post: 7924771, member: 104064&quot;]That&#039;s the thing, isn&#039;t it? I spent the latter part of my career processing and analyzing aerial imagery. Sometimes you have to train yourself to ignore what one part of your brain is telling you and look at the evidence.</p><p><br /></p><p>Are the denticles and the die scratches in the fields near them, &quot;fresh&quot;? No? Why not? They&#039;re the same brightness as the markings in question! Because your brain knows that those elements are original to the coin. You then see something that&#039;s clearly not original to the coin&#039;s design, and associate bright lighting with &quot;recent&quot;. You decide &quot;scratches&quot;. Your brain has made up its mind.</p><p><br /></p><p>Your brain doesn&#039;t like unresolved visual imagery. Now that you&#039;ve made up your mind, evidence to the contrary is invisible. In this case, the observable fact that the corrosion crosses over the markings in many places, and a dark, &quot;old&quot; scratch, goes straight through them. Is this corrosion newer than the &quot;fresh&quot; markings? It has to be. But you ignore that, because it has to be scratches, and you&#039;ve decided. The other element is the perception of incuse versus raised. You&#039;ve decided they&#039;re scratches, and you then can easily perceive them as such. It&#039;s like old black and white images of moon craters - if you view them upside down, they look like mesas and not craters. Here we have an image where strong, low angle light is clearly coming from the top, and most if not all of the markings are bright at the top and shadowed below. There are other small nicks on the coin that are obviously incuse, and they are dark at the top and bright below, as they should be.</p><p><br /></p><p>In fact, when I zoom in on the image and flip it upside-down, I can perceive the markings as incuse. I can flip my perception to &quot;scratches&quot;, because for some reason we presume things are illuminated from above. But if I allow my brain to include the design elements in my upside-down view, the lighting is from below and the markings quickly flip back to raised.</p><p><br /></p><p>That&#039;s just how I perceive this image, and there&#039;s nothing else to go on. If they are in fact incuse, it&#039;s a very deceptive image. And then I&#039;d think a knot of thread struck through is a more feasible explanation, since the other explanation is that somebody freshly scratched off corrosion that then corroded right back over the scratches.</p><p><br /></p><p>Here&#039;s a properly oriented version of the image. I&#039;ve devoted way too much time to this but it&#039;s fun.</p><p><br /></p><p>As far as how do I know it&#039;s an 1866-S 50c Motto - you tell me!</p><p><br /></p><p>[ATTACH=full]1369197[/ATTACH][/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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