It’s some next-level skywatching: Scientists are using images captured by NASA’s InSight lander to look for meteors on Mars.

From a glance at the resulting images, the search seems straightforward: Countless streaks fill the sky. But squint a little, and the story turns out to be more quixotic. The images show mostly ghosts, the invisible made visible and the visible drowned out amid the illusions.

In fact, if you were on Mars as the stars rose, you would see a completely different world than the one on display in night images beamed home by InSight’s cameras. “Essentially, in the images that we have so far, there’s very little content that you would actually see with your eyes,” Mark Lemmon, a scientist at the Space Science Institute who leads the meteor-watching project, told Space.com.

Read more: space