As the title suggests, does the human imagination influence what we think we are seeing through an eye piece? Back in the day of Dunlop and Herschell, and the other great visual explorers, the available equipment was limited, and most replied on sketching to capture the detail they observed. We can speculate that they had the benefit of darker skies, less pollution, etc, but their frame of reference for any object they could target was not tainted by having seen a detailed image of this object. Today, nearly everyone owning a scope has access to tools such as Sky Safari (with it's images) or other planetarium software, or online images from various sources including the Hubble and various great observatory camera systems.
So do observers today convince themselves they can see detail that is not really there in the EP, because they have a memory of the detail from images they have seen? Does this go beyond simply using reference clues from images to know where to concentrate their attention, to being convinced that they are seeing this "Wishful Detail"?
