Picture of the Day

By Monday June 25, 2007

mars_landscape1.jpg

Click on the photo to see a super high resolution Mars Landscape. (34 MB)

There are more Mars photos here. (Notice the Full Resolution View text to the lower left after the jump.)

Found by Art Snyder.



23 Comments
  1. mark says:
    6/25/2007 at 8:32 am

    Tell Eideard to quit posting pictures of his backyard in New Mexico.

  2. KagatoAMV says:
    6/25/2007 at 8:36 am

    That looks more like Arizona.

  3. bobbo says:
    6/25/2007 at 8:37 am

    So you’re saying another faked mission??

    Damn!!! Where are all our tax dollars going?

  4. TNVWBOY says:
    6/25/2007 at 9:29 am

    Thank god it’s rained here the last few days (Nashville). I was beginning to worry my back yard looking like that!

  5. Matthew says:
    6/25/2007 at 9:50 am

    It sure doesn’t look very cold.

    It would be really cool to be able to see live, albeit delayed, footage from a mars rover, maybe the next one will have it.

  6. JimR says:
    6/25/2007 at 9:52 am

    Mars… the definition of irony.

  7. Rob says:
    6/25/2007 at 9:58 am

    All those pictures of Mars, and we STILL haven’t spotted Bin Laden…

    he’s GOTTA be behind one of those rocks somewhere…

  8. dusan maletic says:
    6/25/2007 at 11:03 am

    Images are great, but check the color correction (NASA admits in the fine print that the color correction is an educated guess, but still)….

    Compare the color of the section of the rover in the lower right of the large version of the image presented in the blog with the similar image and the image of the rover taken on Earth…

    Rover color comparison image:

    http://www.physics.rutgers.edu/~dusan/mercolor.jpg

    Lesser problem is shift from real brighter oranges to darker browns of the image, but more important one is shift from real green to bluish in the picture… Adjusted like that these images would fit ESA orbiter images and the true colors much better (example of Gusev crater from ESA):

    http://sci.esa.int/science-e/www/object/index.cfm?fobjectid=34531

  9. BubbaRay says:
    6/25/2007 at 11:24 am

    The official Mars Exploration Rover Mission site is here, with some fine photos etc. on the ‘multimedia’ link. Nice info about a very successful mission for those interested:

    http://marsrovers.nasa.gov/overview/

  10. tallwookie says:
    6/25/2007 at 11:36 am

    #6 – is that because of the high concentrations of iron in the rocks?

  11. JimR says:
    6/25/2007 at 11:48 am

    #8, It looks to me that Nasa is trying to approximate the colour you would see with your eyes if you were there, and I would bet that with their knowledge base, that they are pretty accurate.

    The colour we see is dependent on the light that reaches our eyes. Objects themselves aren’t restricted to a particular colour. The Rover’s wire harness might look yellow to us under fluorescent lights and red-brownish with the light conditions on Mars.

    If you notice the neutral gray paneling in both pictures is gray, although one is a darker shade. Less light is reflected back off an object that is gray under a broad spectrum light source, and because it it absorbes visible colours (to average humans) evenly, the effect of coloured light on the panels is less pronounced.

  12. JimR says:
    6/25/2007 at 11:51 am

    #10, tallwookie… yes, that was the basis of my pun. 😉

  13. BubbaRay says:
    6/25/2007 at 12:42 pm

    #11, JimR, that’s precisely correct.

    The color of the light falling on the Martian landscape can change from minute to minute, as the angle of the sun changes. Swirling dust in the thin atmosphere can change the lighting from day to day. Before the Pancams take each set of pictures, they swivel around and snap a series of pictures of a small calibration target (informally known as the Martian sundial) mounted on the rover’s rear solar panels.

    Here’s some info on (and a picture of) the ‘sundial’:
    http://athena.cornell.edu/kids/sundial.html

  14. Jägermeister says:
    6/25/2007 at 12:51 pm

    American cars would melt right in with the landscape…

  15. hhopper says:
    6/25/2007 at 1:14 pm

    At least the Plymouth they just dug up would.

  16. hhopper says:
    6/25/2007 at 1:18 pm

    BubbaRay – The Martian sundial shows up in the hi-res version of the photo.

    mars_sundial.jpg

  17. tcc3 says:
    6/25/2007 at 1:29 pm

    Hey, its Durotar. You can almost see the Troll camp just over that hill!

  18. NASA is lame says:
    6/25/2007 at 3:20 pm

    That is lame. Show me true color pictures, regardless of the lack of atmosphere. Tinting the picture to make the ‘red planet’ look ‘redder’ isn’t science, it’s marketing…

    DAMN NASA maroons and their filters!!!

  19. AdmFubar says:
    6/25/2007 at 6:57 pm

    Sorry you are all wrong about the location, this is a picture of the rust belt…

  20. BubbaRay says:
    6/25/2007 at 7:08 pm

    #18, tell me how those pictures of your kids turn out when you leave the white balance on your camera set for “cloudy skies” instead of “fluorescent lighting.” The only ‘filters’ on the Pancams are RBG (plus infrared) and the ‘sundial’ is used to precisely adjust each color for good white balance under current ambient conditions. Please see posts #11, 13, 16.

    #16, Hop, thanks for the extract, I couldn’t get the hi-res to download in Firefox on a slow connection while traveling. White / gray balance looks pretty good to me.

  21. dusan maletic says:
    6/26/2007 at 7:14 am

    #20 (and previous related posts)

    Question is not the ambient light or white/gray balance (which they got well). Very good example why is in the image I originally posted:

    http://www.physics.rutgers.edu/~dusan/mercolor.jpg

    In the “inset” picture pay attention to two opposite color shifts:
    1) Yellow cable becomes orange, shift to higher wavelengths. This alone would be possible due to the ambient light.
    2) Blue and white cable wraps become purple and white… Shift to the lower wavelengths. Again, possible alone due to the ambient light but not in combination with the (1).

    If ambient light is as in (1) blue wraps would look greenish. If ambient light is as (2) yellow cable would become greenish…

    So, what NASA did is “spread” the spectrum too wide, while centering it perfectly (hence good grey/white). To underline this I again draw your attention to ESA image. No brownish-orange there but quite yellowish surface. Also, instead of the bluish appearance of some stones on NASA image, green areas in ESA image reflect where these are and their “truer” color.

    http://sci.esa.int/science-e/www/object/index.cfm?fobjectid=34531

  22. JimR says:
    6/26/2007 at 7:33 am

    dusan, if you are able to use filters to achieve the required illusion of what we “see” then the same illusion is possible without the filters and a specific light source. Camera sensors are balanced to “earth” light. It’s the same effect when you used to use outdoor film inside without a flash.

    Also, what you “see” is only the wavelengths NOT absorbed by the objects you are looking at, so it is probable that some objects will absorb shorter wavelengths while others absorb longer ones revealing opposite ends of the spectrum when the mid wavelengths are reduced at the source.

  23. Ron says:
    6/26/2007 at 1:09 pm

    Damn those off roaders, the environment will never recover!


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