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Colorization of Mars Images?
ares2003 writes "There is no scientific reason, why JPL is colorizing Mars in that dull red tint as in their press release images. In the latest panorama image, there is a hint, that they deliberately altered the colors, as the blue and green spots on the color calibration target (the sundial) suddenly converted to bright red and brown. Source of original images: 1, 2 - (for highres replace "br" with "med"). At normal weather conditions, as we have at the moment, there should be a blue sky on Mars and earthlike colors. Furthermore the sky looks overcasted on the pictures as it cannot be considering the sharp shadows on the sundial. If the sky was overcast, then because of diffuse lighting, there would be no shadows. A few years ago, I did an investigation about that very same topic for the Viking and Pathfinder missions."
Roses are Red Violets are Blue That's what they tell me Because I'm blind.
Way to go, Michael.
The bigotry of the nonbeliever is for me nearly as funny as the bigotry of the believer. - Albert Einstein
Shouldn't there be a red sky? All the dust in the atmosphere is heavily red-tinted due to iron content, by my understanding. Am I wrong? Anyone out there a planetary geologist or actually WORK for NASA?
Unitarian Church: Freethinkers Congregate!
I saw a picture of a martian family with placards reading, "Please send our daughter Carly back!"
This explains her recent tech outbursts.
Its no secret that they doctor the images for press release. They also have the original available. Check out Maestro, it was mentioned on Slashdot a few days ago, its almost the same software JPL uses, and the images in the data set are the original ones.
The ammount of gibberish in the mars-news.de site!!!!
Check the final paragraph of this page
Life isn't like a box of chocolates. It's more like a jar of jalapenos. What you do today, might burn your ass tomorrow.
Not sure if this could be the reason but the MER-A pictures aren't taken at a specific time but rather during a whole day.
That means that the colors you see on the sundial don't match all frames of the final picture you get.
NASA therefore alters the colors to match the pictures as closely as possible. Maybe this disturbs the color? Not sure though. What do you think?
..but releasing these images to the public is a public relations endeavor, not a scientific endeavor.
This is one of his pet theories, along with the fact that the reason for the color change is the hide the Earth-like appearance of Mars so we don't figure out that humans once lived there.
What is this, the tabloid section of slashdot?
The photos clearly have been doctored because they don't match the scenery in "Total Recall".
They're modifying the colours because the spacecraft isn't actually on Mars, it's on Mauna Kea in Hawaii. Or maybe Haleakala, where they did Lunar Rover testing. Either one, they're both pretty good places for faking either Moon or Mars landings.
My kids had lots of fun with those airbags, BTW.
All of the spectacular Hubble images that have been released over the past few years have been composites of various grayscale images each falsely-colored by whatever elements or wavelengths they represent. The result is a truly spectacular image that is accessible to people who have no interest in what the images actually show, but in just the beauty of the image itself. The exact same thing is true of the Spirit images.
We here on Slashdot rant about NASA budgets, and lack of interest in a manned space program. The only way to increase public interest is by catching their attention. Grayscale images simply are not going to cut it. I see no problem at all in colorizing images if it means more viewers are going to be interested, and therefore want to learn more.
Sure, the purist in me finds it a bit irritating, but as with many things, the pros far outweigh the cons.
Maybe their camera is just color blind
MonkeysKickAss
You must have missed the news. Ted Turner bought out JPL yesterday.
My, God the submitter needs, to learn how to use commas, properly when he writes, something that hundreds of thousands of people will potentially, read...
the coolest club on
It amazes me that so many allegedly "educated" people have fallen so quickly and so hard for a fraudulent fabrication of such laughable proportions. The very idea that a gigantic ball of rock happens to orbit our planet, showing itself in neat, four-week cycles -- with the same side facing us all the time -- is ludicrous. Furthermore, it is an insult to common sense and a damnable affront to intellectual honesty and integrity. That people actually believe it is evidence that the liberals have wrested the last vestiges of control of our public school system from decent, God-fearing Americans (as if any further evidence was needed! Daddy's Roommate? God Almighty!)
.. the next time you're out in the backyard exercising your Second Amendment rights, the liberals will see it! These satellites are sensitive enough to tell the difference between a Colt .45 and a .38 Special! And when they detect you with a firearm, their computers cross-reference the address to figure out your name, and then an enormous database housed at Berkeley is updated with information about you.
Documentaries such as Enemy of the State have accurately portrayed the elaborate, byzantine network of surveillance satellites that the liberals have sent into space to spy on law-abiding Americans. Equipped with technology developed by Handgun Control, Inc., these satellites have the ability to detect firearms from hundreds of kilometers up. That's right, neighbors
Of course, this all works fine during the day, but what about at night? Even the liberals can't control the rotation of the Earth to prevent nightfall from setting in (only Joshua was able to ask for that particular favor!) That's where the "moon" comes in. Powered by nuclear reactors, the "moon" is nothing more than an enormous balloon, emitting trillions of candlepower of gun-revealing light. Piloted by key members of the liberal community, the "moon" is strategically moved across the country, pointing out those who dare to make use of their God-given rights at night!
Yes, I know this probably sounds paranoid and preposterous, but consider this. Despite what the revisionist historians tell you, there is no mention of the "moon" anywhere in literature or historical documents -- anywhere -- before 1950. That is when it was initially launched. When President Josef Kennedy, at the State of the Union address, proclaimed "We choose to go to the moon", he may as well have said "We choose to go to the weather balloon." The subsequent faking of a "moon" landing on national TV was the first step in a long history of the erosion of our constitutional rights by leftists in this country. No longer can we hide from our government when the sun goes down.
Hmmm, the pictures look awfully white to me. Almost as if the images weren't being displayed at all...
Oh, wait. That's because they're Slashdotted already.
The average person expects Mars to be red, if they don't make it red people will not think its Mars. It's not really that they are 'lying' or anything, its just that the average person is too ignorant for them to want to deal with the hassle of everyone wanting to know why the pictures are not red.
:-)
Sure it might be nice to try to explain it to people but they would be drowned by the conspiracy freaks claiming they were pictures of the Arizona desert.
Hey isn't that a highway in the background of the last pic.......
-jon
The studio that faked the moon landing and faked the Mars landing is good, but you can't expect them to get everything perfectly right.
The images they took are shot through near-infrared filters, and then digitally adjusted to compensate. The pan-cams each have about 16 different types of filters on a rotating wheel, but this near-infrared filter is the only color that's common to both lenses. Therefore, when they're taking stereo images, that's the best one to use. It's not a conspiracy, and they'll probably release images taken through the other filters eventually.
What a lot of people don't get is the apparent contrast between the division and the union. It's all about polarity of interests. Some people enjoy vinegar in the potatoes.
Geez...
...it would be more likely that the public would realize that they're just filming this whole shebang out in the Utah desert.
Everyone knows that Mars is red. So changing the colors on the pictures that they show to the public is probable just a PR stunt... to make it look exotic and exciting... when it really doesn't look at that exotic...
Or... if your like to think big... it is really just eastern Oregon that they are showing and they really spent all money on something else.
Zeelan
Maybe this is the problem
e pi cs/photoshop/01-09-04-space/Bimston.jpg
http://images.somethingawful.com/inserts/articl
Imagination is the silver lining of Intelligence.
He's not talking about merely colorization (in this case, redder than it is), but the the fact that the colors of the sundial do not match in the pictures is a bit disturbing. Why don't they match? If it was a uniform coloration, it would be understandable. Or is it perhaps a mistake and that they meant to color the other two colored areas?
A blog like any other.
Did, anyone find, the submission a, little painful to, read? I, did.
Ted turner hinted that he may have some high level involvement in America's space endeavours. By showing his spaceworthy editing skills, he hopes to regain the attentions of a girl he only refers to as "Barbarella"
Just as irrigation is the lifeblood of the Southwest, lifeblood is the soup of cannibals. -- Jack Handy
Following the same theory, in which I don't believe, you would come to the conclusion that the Mars landings never took place, and were staged for some reason or another.
For example, you mean to tell me that since the last space shuttle crash, which was only a year ago, they had time to modify their Mars lander design to include that "In Memoriam" placard that's on there? They would have had to do it almost immediately after the crash because it takes time to get to Mars. A long time.
Hmmmmmm. Maybe there is a conspiracy theory. Nasa should have been good enough to make the color dials stay the same while the rest of the photo is altered... but I guess you can't think of everything.
Why would such a fake be done? To make other countries fear the U.S.'s technology? To jack billions of bucks from the taxpayers and funnel it into all sorts of secret government programs? I don't know.
It's a conspiracy. To make people...
BELIEVE THAT MARS IS RED!
Thanks for alerting us to that potential communist menace, senator.
3D Printing Tips and Tricks at Zheng3.com
...for that comma after 'reason.'
First "Gone With The Wind" and now this.
its the easiest way to make that moon studio look like mars. smooth the dust out, add random smooth stones/rocks all over, turn on the red light.
[insert here: obligatory post on faked moon and mars landings]
as the blue and green spots on the color calibration target (the sundial) suddenly converted to bright red and brown.
The "sudden" change happened as NASA "suddenly" applied another filter for the camera. They do this to better detect certain things in the picture I suppose. They spoke about it on a press conference when they was asked this question.
From Mozilla guru Asa Dotzler's weblog:
Q. Then what we're seeing that's in that Pancam image doesn't correspond to what we'd see if we were standing there?
Jim: we have a pair of red filters that give us stereo. The red you're asking about is the infrared filter which is different from the red humans see. We can convert that red easily. We also have a red filter that matches human sight red but we prefer to use the infrared filter to get matchup with both cameras. Two cameras each have 8 filters. One filter on one eye is a dense welder-like filter to look at the sun. On the left camera is low frequency and the right camera is higher frequencies. Total of 11 unique wavelengths.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
The lander actually crashed and NASA does not want to admit to another failure. The pictures are done by some graphic artist who is taking pictures of his sons sandbox and doctoring them up with Photoshop. The rocks are actually cat turds and the rover in the pictures are some beaten up tonka toys.
Unfortunately, it seems the primary motivation for the Mars for the general population is now sensationalism. I'm sure the Slashdot audience how a different view on Mars though.
USA Today has a good article about how Mars is shifting from science to politics.
The Washington Post explains better the goals of the current US gov.
I'm not saying it's necessarily a bad thing because that's usually how space projects get more funding but it might explain why the photos are looking more "nice to the user" than "scientifically realistic".
It is not enough to have a good mind. The main thing is to use it well. - Rene Descartes (1637)
It's all that imperialist bush's actions... he's the root of all this fake information, and is using it to give money to his friends! Why isn't this obvious to the REST of the world! Everyone hates this, and only those foolish americans watching fox must believe this trash..
Oh, and it's all done by the new Microsoft/SCO software..
NASA is hiding something.
My guess is that JFK and Bigfoot are alive on Mars and they've got Saddam's WMDs there too.
Oh man. I've been reading this site for a while. This story should just be deleted, or at least have the links removed. There is absolutely no need to give this loon publicity while taxing the jpl site for no reason.
They're probably using a blue filter to block Raleigh scattering. We do a lot of image processing, and it's common to use a blue filter in images where you want sharp detail and aren't as concerned about the proper color. Blue light tends to scatter more because of it's low wavelength. If you don't filter it you can end up with just a haze in your image where you'd otherwise have sharp detail in the image.
So put the conspiracy theory to rest.
Hmm. Leveraging the 2001 imprints in the collective conscience to deliver more Californian Engineer Welfare. What the hoars won't do.
a truely, amazing, device!
Blar.
You forgot a 't'
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
It's been slashdotted so here's a mirror
I don't think this has been addressed on it yet, but a good reference for these sorts of claims is Bad Astronomy.
The questions are, of course,
- if there is a tinted color light source, what would the color target display on a normal color target? What would it show via the camera with the tinted light source
- The sun is the same light source on mars as it is on earth, therefore it should be easy enough to take a solar spectrum and see what the degree of tinting is.
- With an atmosphere at 1% or less of the earth, the spectrum could nearly be the same spectrum as in a vacuum
- if the spectrums are essentially similar, then the color targets should be the same, say as on earth or in vacuum, given a clear day without dust and clouds, etc.
See also this slashdot story on the Mars Sundials"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
The video images of Mars surface shown on NASA TV does not look red. Perhap those images were not taken with the rover's color camera.
They have been changing the color ever since that they had an accident with an camera ( think that whas un viking probe and the miscolored photos it sent back) they now still use same filtering system on all the pictures ewen when it's now proven that is unnecessary.
Read here
The sundial from a little while ago helps find tint and all. The pics need calibration.... doesn't sound like a conspiracy to me.
What other color would it be? Green? To my understanding the pictures have been color-enhanced to bring up the contrast a bit, but that's about all. If you look at the Maestro images which have supposedly been untampered, Mars still looks awfully red, sky and all. If I understand from reading such pseudo-scientific works as Red Mars, this is the normal state of the planet and the pictures are pretty representative of reality.
why? what is the martian atmosphere composed of?
Earth's is 79% nitrogen, 20% oxygen, and 1% other gases. and even then givin certain scenarios even earths sky isnt blue
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
they want us to think Mars is red so we can nuke the commie bastards when we see them running around in their little green-man underground cities and not feel bad about it.
rawr!
(no i don't really think commies are bastards)
So here are some pictures I leeched before it was Slashdotted:
Picture 1 Pretty Self Explanitory
Picture 2 Photo from the Viking missions
Picture 3 Color corrected photo from the Pathfinder lander
Picture 4 Original image from the Pathfinder
The World is Yours.
...what I want to know is:
Why does the Spirit rover have an Atari game console joystick installed on it?
I remember a book on the Viking missions to mars I read about 20 years ago-which I think was by Sagan- anyway by someone reputable- anyway he states that they initially got the colors wrong in the viking mission- they were much too red...granted the correct colors look like the ones they're getting from the rover. Still, a bit of truth is in the post at least...
that's made of green cheese-a compelling reason to send astronauts.
Quaid must not have started the reactor yet.
But I do think they need a spectrum from Mars to act as a baseline.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Th reason it occurs is because of the filters on the pancam. On #mastro on irc.freenode.net: if someone wants to post a "conspiracy beatdown" on slashdot, here't the tech docs of pan-cam, and its filters, which are labeled (l1-8, r1-8) the same way the raw images are http://athena.cornell.edu/pdf/tb_pancam.pdf
What I want to see if Mars at night. Why can't they take a few pictures of what the two moons look like from the surface? They always take daytime pictures.
with the PR photos. Get the actual images elsewhere. They have a "show" to put on, so people actually might decide they want to continue to fund space exploration. I know I prefer this to funding nation building/oil exploitation...
There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments. --Bene Gesserit Axiom
What the hell are you talking about?
I Wood not consider the privius statment funny cince thats not to unbeliveble. Hey i still dont think thay went to the moon. (do you own resech and you figure it out)
I don't know about the colors, but one thing that I did find odd is the obvious and clumsy seams between the component images of the mosaics. I used to work with satellite imagery back in the early 80's, and it was pretty routine to resample the images so that they fit together seamlessly. I wonder why JPL isn't bothering to do that? It's not rocket science, after all...
i would like to point out that several amateur astronomers on various forums swear that the images they have taken of mars shows a blue atmospher. the cost of a good telescope and CCD camera is such that many people around the world have corroborated this, and there are images out there for all to see what mars really looks like.
...is to prevent the rest of the world from knowing that Mars is actually made of solid gold. The Whitehouse got first wind of this and is trying to keep the lid on until we launch operation "Pay off national credit card debt." That is the real reason Dubya is proposing going back, to bring back all the sweet sweet national-debt-paying-off gold.
The .jpgs that NASA releases from the HST can't really be called 'false coloured' as they aren't the real data. Let me explain to those who don't spend their lives processing HST data.
The data that comes off the HST is reserved for one year to the requesting individual/organisation (and, yes, this is controversial). But it is nothing like the images that NASA releases for the general public. The HST data comes down in a series of CCD output prints, often with whatever spectroscopy data has been requested, most often as a wavelength/intensity matrix. You can't dump that easily into any image editor; it's just a string of numbers. Equally if you dump all the spectra onto one image you will see a nearly black and white picture. So you select the spectra that interest you, and look for anomalies. The resulting pictures used are of little use to the non-astronomer - they aren't full colour, and are often just 4-bit colour showing intensity of a particular spectrum. The pretty pictures come from working out what looks good and combining it, so all images are 'false colour' in some way or another.
I don't know about the Spirit mission, but I'd guess the same applied
Exercise your right not to vote. thinkoutside.org
What?! You mean all those spectacular spacescapes that they've been using in Star Trek Voyager and the TNG movies don't really exist? Damn! I was looking forward to getting a good close look at the Horsehead Nebula one day.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
Ted Turner now owns JPL through some proxies and dupes. That's why they're colorized.
This is a bit wierd, last night when I was looking at the mars pics I commented on the uncanny similarities with the Arizona desert.
A blog about stuff.
This story should be pulled, it is wrong in too many places, and is just a bunch of conspiracy mumbo-jumbo. The pictures are slightly modded for color, but that's because it's a collage
As evidenced, here, the Martian sky is more yellow/butterscotch (they used the Viking landers American flag to balance the colors properly,pictures are on the website). The Martian sky doesn't really get "overcasted" as there is no moisture in the air to create clouds! There is dust, yes, but the atmosphere is so thin, the sunlight can still go through it. Ares2003 has a few loose screws-My guess is that the digital image of the craft itself was taken later in the martian day, and modifying the color of the photo was the only way to make it look like it "fit in". Mars should not have "earth-like" colors. Any glance through a moderately-powerful telescope will show that the "red planet" is, in fact, red in color (iron oxide dust). Those more yellow pictures of Mars floating around are actually not real photographs, but generated images from the Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter data.
To see lots of pictures and some scientific conjecture and analysis, you can go here
This should make your head explode. :-)
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
I was watching a press conference on CSPAN and the guys at JPL actually brought this up themselves. The thing is the camera's have filters for a wide variety of wavelengths many of which aren't visual light at all. Each camera has a different array of filters and actually only share two filters in common for stereo vision.
I got the impression that many of the fiters that ARE within the visual portion of the spectrum were only letting in narrow bands of the spectrum. Exactly what color SHOULD infra-red images be? For obvoius reasons keeping them in their "orignal" spectrum would be fairly useless - though "red" would be as close as we can come.
For just pretty pictures rather than scientific data NASA is color-correcting the images - I think it is more involved than simply colorizing a black and white image. They mentioned compositing together several images from different filters to get a fair approximation of what the human eye would percieve if it was there.
and apply auto level and color correction. It looks just like Arizona. Hey! It's a conspiracy!
But this depends on if it is infra red and rendering the paint chip in an unexpected manner
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
I'm looking at a large high res panorama of mars right now. There's a nice silvery bit on the rover that is virtually untouched by any color alterations. I can see where they might have enhanced the saturation a little, but if they colorized it, they went through a hell of a lot of effort to do so. (i.e. cutting out the non-red objects, etc...)
Sorry, not buying this story. Even if Nasa did colorize it, so what? I spent a day at a major news network once. I got to watch how they get their stories up. EVERY photo that goes up for a story is retouched. When I was there, there was a big story about a wildfire eating up a lot of land. They took some stock footage of a firefighter putting out a fire in the woods. Then, they highlighted the fire itself and used a tool to make it look brighter and hotter. (Note: This wasn't supposed to be a photo of the fire itself, but rather one of those illustrations that appears behind the news anchor as he announces the story..)
The point? The reason they brightened the fire was to draw attention to the audience. Highlight the important elements of the scene. There's no crime or dishonest happening here. If Nasa boosted the saturation of their images to make their images more recognizable Mars, so what? Damn them for presenting their findings more clearly.
"Derp de derp."
Yesterday's lander homepage explained it all pretty good if you'd have bothered to read it. And if indeed you did read it, and somehow managed to not understand... All you would have to have done was to ask an artist, or photographer who deals with electronic representations of color. If you notice the "sun dial" on the lander; It has four color swatches on it. There is an identical "sun dial" here on Earth with the identical four color swatches on it that our kind folks at NASA (or JPL, I'm not sure) use to CALIBRATE the photos with. http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/press/spiri t/20040108a/PIA05018_br.jpg
The colors you see on your monitor, flat panel, or TV, are simply representations of color that your eye/brain assembles from the Red, Green, and Blue elements on your viewing device. The strength of the individual RGB elements on the screen are effected by temperature, magnetic field strength & fluctuation, age of the phosphors, voltage, and many other things. The colors will be slightly (or greatly) different on every single monitor and/or TV you view it on.
Calibration of the actual picture file is quite simple in theroy: You just adjust the RGB values of the file on a calibrated monitor until they look just like the duplicate object your holding in your hand.
Of course, there needs to be taken in account the wavelengths of light that the Martian atmosphere filters out so we know which ones are reflected off of the swatches into the camera.... I don't know how they do that.
change it.
The true /. Axis of Evil
Care to explain the sharp shadows in this picture then? It was taken inside a cloud.
irb(main):001:0>
...in an altered hue.
1) Solar powered?
2) Frost on the lens?
3) The martians are nocturnal?
Open that image in Photoshop or similar and it's pretty obvious that aside from the noise there is no blue. If it's a filter on the camera it's set to 100%.
More likely someone turned off the blue channel during processing and liked the way the result looked.
Shortly after the link was posted the mars-news.de site stopped responding! "The Man"(tm) must have flown in on his black stealth choppers and unplugged their servers!
If God had had a computer it would have taken him 7 months to create the earth...if he even bothered to do it at all.
Even basic research into the principles of photography would expose one to the fact that the camera doesn't see things the same way the eye does.
Any colors captured on Mars are subject to various elements that would alter color. Such as different atmosphere than Earth, changing atmosphere during day, changing angle of light source, light reflected off surroundings. Even if calibrated against the sundial, changing the direction the camera is pointed will change things.
Mars isn't exactly a controlled environment like a studio.
When will Windows be ready for the desktop?
>Its no secret that they doctor the images for press release
Really?
Why don't NASA state that on their site? Quickly looking, I can't find it.
Where can I get the original, uncolourized photo of the picture in question?
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
What with no sun to drive the solar panels and all, they don't want to run battery power down, and operate sensitive electronics when it's extremely cold.
No device "sees" colors the way humans see color. Heck, no two humans see color the same way. All images, especially science images, whether they are photographic prints or digital images, are colorized and manipulated and stretched and bent and filtered and modified to enphasize the details the investigator is interested in.
You think Jupiter is a really garish ball of swirling colorful gasses? Think again. All the Galileo and Voyager images have saturation boosted a great deal, and the contrast is stretched mightily. Furthermore, the luminance layer is deconvolved to bring subtle spatial details into sharper relief. To the human eye, Jupiter is a rather bland beige-ish ball with some hint of subtle color here and there, and not much obvious detail. The same goes for Io, which is usually depicted as a bright yellow/orange malestrom. It's "real" colors - what a human in orbit would see - are also rather bland.
Edith Keeler Must Die
If they are capturing any audio samples from Mars? I'm sure it must be of some use to scientists and just as easy to transmit..
If anything hearing the martian winds added to the landscape would add a whole new dimension to the maritian landscape.
I'm not an atmospheric geek, but:
At normal weather conditions, as we have at the moment, there should be a blue sky on Mars and earthlike colors
Umm... ever ask "why is the sky blue" as a kid and get the real answer? Martian atmosphere is nothing like ours, and I'm willing to bet the house that mars never has a blue earth-like sky.
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
These plans are all very exciting folks, but our grandchildren are going to be paying the bill one day. It's time for the current administration to cut up the credit cards and start taking packed lunches instead of eating out, for a day of reckoning is coming and the American taxpayer is going to suffer badly. Entry into the third world awaits....
Drill baby drill - on Mars
Ok, here's a little experiment for 'ya.
Procure a color chart. If you cannot, procure a box of crayons and make several large marks of relatively uniform saturation using the colors "Red" "Green" and "Blue." If you're truly adventurous, you may try a nice burnt umber or perhaps attempt various gradations from black to white.
Place this color chart on the ground.
Using the exact same settings on your camera, photograph this chart at sunrise, high noon and sunset. Do this on days of varying weather conditions.
If possible, start a large brush fire. Wait for large reddish clouds to filter the sunlight. Photograph your chart again. This is probably illegal, so wait until someone else does this for you.
Now wait until midnight. Photograph your chart using a flash.
In Photoshop, adust the color balance of all of your photos to match the last image.
Voila, all of your images are now completely indistinguishable from each other and you have lost all of the information you recorded by making photographs in varying lighting conditions.
DUH.
Ok, I went ahead and did a favor for the slashdot community and mankind. I took the fake colorized images and colored them back to the original infrared colors. You can see the results here. I hope this pleases the original story submitter.
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
ha!
I thought it was red because the Soviets got there first.
/. post and I didn't know whether to go funny, informative, or troll and I think I missed all three...
Helpful timeline
Oct 1957 - Sputnik 1 - first LEO
Sep 1959 - Luna 2 - first Lunar impact
Feb 1962 - Mercury 6 - first manned LEO
Jan 1966 - Luna 9 - first Lunar landing
Jul 1969 - Apollo 11 - first manned Lunar landing
Aug 1970 - Venera 7 - first Venus landing
May 1973 - Mars 3 - first Mars landing
Yeah, it's my first
We now return you to your regularly scheduled thread.
brought to its knees by the /. effect.
Setting his threshold to 5, Sparky eliminated most of the trolls on /.
Perhaps the reason they colored them red is to cut down the conspiracy theories: "See, the sky is blue. That *proves* that this is just being broadcast from some desert backlot in New Mexico."
"I'm not impatient. I just hate waiting." - My Dad
Am i the only weary eyed programmer who, on a friday afternoon after a week of finger-blistering coding binges, suffered a minor caffiene induced hallicination and read the title as "Colonization of Mars Images"?
Ah, if only the weekend wasn't so short.
Like the Hubble pics that all the geeks love. They're gone over by artists before you ever see them.
Why? The shots are too friggin' boring to stand by themselves. That, and Ted Turner runs NASA
There's no grammatical reason, why he keeps using commas in places that don't need them.
It really, makes me stumble over his words.
.sigs are for post^Hers.
Probably to protect the rover in case of this scenario .
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
I think I saw the same sign, but it was a little difficult to read. I thought it said, "Re: Darl & Kevin. We're sorry. Please send them back as soon as you capture them. We'll put them under tighter security this time."
Come to think of it, "Darl" does look like a Martian name.
:p
in releasing the images, you'd have multiples of the same images, each one reflecting what the landscape would look like in a specific spectrum, just like those images of the Sun you get in various space weather websites -- one for visible spectrum, one for infrared, one for ultraviolet, one for x-rays, and so on.
Conspiracy Theory Made E-Z:
1. Assume people care enough about you to fool you.
2. Add scientific terms and definitions to give credibility, even if it really doesn't have much to do with the theory
3. ???
4. Profit!
____________________________________________
"Red shift shows increasing totalitarian domination of the outer reaches of the universe. Write your congressman!" - from Science Made Stupid
This is a "Bill Nye" project.
This is an obvious coverup by NASA. Look at the reference tile. Upper right corner in the picture provided. It's green, right? Now look at the "tampered" version. It's barely visible.
This, my friends, is an obvious coverup. Of what, you ask? What do you know that is green and would be on Mars? Obviously, Martians! Everyone knows they are green. The only logical explanation is clearly that while we have been watching Mars, Mars has been watching us. To cover up evidence of the little green men, they've tampered with the color so as to make them invisible against the background!
This is so obvious and simple, I don't know why someone else didn't think it up!
(And if you believe this, I've got a tinfoil hat for you for $19.99 plus S&H. Limited time only!)
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
best method of dl'ing pr0n?
Tnx.
-AC
No, the sky is blue on earth due to the exact conditions we have here. If our atmosphere was less dense, the sky would be darker (less diffused light). Our atmosphere is so dense and made up of the right stuff (nitrogen, oxygen, carbon dioxide) that our sky is actually violet. However, because our sun puts off more yellow and green light then any other colors, our eyes have adapted to seeing those colors better, and the sky appears to be "sky blue". As the atmosphere gets less dense, it shifts left on the EM scale (roygbiv), and gets darkers overall. As it gets more dense, it shifts left on the EM scale(that's why sunsets are red, the sunlight passes through more air at sunset and sunrise) It's actually very complex to determine what color a sky will be. It depends on these factors-
Incoming light colors
atmosphere make-up
atmosphere density
angle of incidence
the eye of the observer
That's why Mars has a butterscotch sky- very low density atmosphere made up almost entirely of CO2
Spirit Flips the First Bird on Mars
Downloadable Sims Object:
Price: 100 Simoleans
NASA's Spirit Rover tests its defensive mechanisms against aggressive Martian Robots Gone Wild, by Flipping the first Bird on Mars [image censored by NASA]. NASA has assured the public that at this time, no Martian Robots Gone Wild have been detected by Spirit, and this is simply a standard diagnostic procedure.
http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/all/2/p/004 /2P126721799EFF0200P2215R2M1.JPG
Download: http://www.donhopkins.com/blog/SimsObjects/2004/01 /09/mars_3x3_544938.iff
-Don
Take a look and feel free: http://www.PieMenu.com
http://humbabe.arc.nasa.gov/mgcm/faq/sky.html
s /b lusky.html
http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/atmo
The martian sky color comes primarily from dust, which overpowers any rayleigh effects from the pitifully thin atmosphere (1% of earth's)
... I welcome our new martian overlords, you insensitive clod!
The colors you see in those lovely space pictures *are* real. No, we do not actually see them.
"huh?"
The colors we see in planets in space... red Mars, blue Neptune... etc all appear because those are the colors they reflect most strongly.
Deeper in space nebulae are the most colorful objects. Some of these are reflection nebulae.. they reflect light from nearby stars, but also scatter it, so they appear bluish.. just like our atmosphere scatters light and comes out blue.
Most visibile nebulae are emission nebulae though. They shine because hot stars inside them excite gases that then emit a red color.
"Ok, but *why* do we not see them??" you ask.
I will tell you!
There are two types of human vision.. "day" and "night" vision.. or the more scientific names... photopic(day) and scotopic(night). Photopic, usually known as just "day" or "color" vision, involves the receptors in the eyes known as cones. Scotopic vision is for low light situations and uses the receptors in the eye known as rods.
For photopic vision to be triggered, you must be looking at a very bright object. (Or looking through a telescope that can make the object appear bright).
You can observe this by looking at the stars: with the naked eye almost all appear white. With binoculars or a telescope though, you can see the lovely blue Rigel, red Betelgeuse, yellow Capella, and more.
So the reason you can see such color in these pictures of space is that cameras, both silver halide and CCD, have significant advantages over our eyes. They can collect light over a period of seconds.. hours.. days even. We meager humans are limited to collecting light over 1/30 of a second though.
Holger's site is down just now, he originally posted it here though (same image is linked in that thread, which you still won't see - slashdotted).
:)
Actually, a few of us chat on the SlashNet IRC server Holger included (he's in the chat just now actually - he's the guy who's webserver is now on fire thx to that link
Come talk to us, it'll be fun! irc.slashnet.org - #anomalies
First, there is no loss of information. The original data streams are maintained and kept available.
Second, the images *need* processing. They are taken in ambient light which does not contain the same distribution of frequencies as "white" light on Earth. The cameras are designed to be calibrated with the ambient light actually found when they land for later postprocessing.
I have discovered a truly marvelous sig, unfortunately the sig limit is too small to contain i
On the nature of color and all that.
I'm not saying they didn't colorize the images for good public perception... however.
How do you think they should do it? Without a fair bit of calibaration by a home user, the colors involved will be wrong anyway... why not pick something that gets the point across?
Anyone who wants can get the actual RAW data from the project anyway, and work on it themselves, if they are concerned with accuracy.
Red colorization even on Earth. Proof:
f t/ 03pd0212_br.html
http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/spacecra
GIMP?
It would be nice propagation: "...as seen on fake images, processed by a gimp at JPL"
At first, nothing happened. Then I started smiling at your posts. Next... laughing?
Did you look at the second sundial here on earth? Maybe it turned red too!
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Colorization. What is that all about? Is it good or is it whack?
I am old enough to remember that during the viking mission, the very first pictures that were aired showed a blue sky. But when they looked at a red electrical cable visible within the cameras field of view, they decided that the colour balance was off, and made adjustments so that the cables looked right. the sky turned from blue to pink. Thus came the first pictures of the pink martian sky.
Of course, I would be distrustful of the any colour chip reference anyway. Two years in the temperature and radiation extremes of space will likely wreak havoc with paint chips, unless they had gone for a ride in the LDEF (Long Duration Exposure Facility) and were re-checked on the ground for accuracy. Even then, the LDEF never made it out of earth's protective magnetic field.
My rights don't need management.
While it is true that sky color is based largely on diffraction, Mars' atmosphere is made of different chemicals than is Earth's, so the diffraction won't be the same as on Earth. Furthermore, Mars has lots of dust in the air, as well as reflection from the ground, that would give everything a red tint. The fact that the sundial was blue was probably an old picture of it on Earth. Now that it's on Mars it, and everything else, will appear red. Sorry folks, but blue skies aren't everywhere.
We wouldn't want to give up our latest and greatest just yet...so, they will graduate to Galaga and Ms. Pac Man when Odyssey lands in a few days.
It will be quite some time before we set up a WAN for them to play Counter-Strike and Unreal Tournament.
I'm pretty sure the original story is deliberately intended as a troll.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
Those Martians are going to want to make a good first impression when they line up in front of the rovers to have their pictures taken for OSDN Personals, and JPL is getting rid of any of that nasty red eye. "I enjoy long walks on the dry beach and a couple pan galactic gargle blasters on the weekend"
~~~
This really isn't worth being featured on Slashdot. There is no conspiracy, and the authors paranoia is just plain scary. I can't get a good article about thermo-electric engines posted, but this idiot gets this twaddle posted? Slashdot, meet Fox News, Fox News, meet Slashdot.
"Curiosity killed the cat, but for a while I was a suspect."- Steven Wright
It's just a small "preview" of his upcoming album.
If you here, for example, you can see a good quantity of the images they're releasing. They're in groups of three, for the most part -- and funny, but light has three primary colors -- and they seem to be in RGB order (as guessed by experimentation with the white tones in the last set, with the airbag visible). Thus you too can see what Mars looks like before being color (calibrated|corrected|conspiricized) by integrating the three images in (your favorite imaging software). Then, if only we could find the color data for the calibration sundial, it would be possible to recurve the colors to match the known values. I haven't found this stuff yet, but I'm stil looking. And I don't know if the GIMP can do this part (since I haven't used it enough) but I'm postive that Photoshop or Corel Photo-Paint can handle it. So get the data and prove for yourself whether or not it's real!
I know that there's no perfect way to maintain color fidelity in any image transmission system, but just for my edification I'd appreciate it if they would release images adjusted best they can to look as the scene would if I were there with my Nikon and a roll of K64.
I saw on NASA TV yesterday they were talking about how there are 8 different lenses on each camera of the stereo array. They even mentioned how the dots on the color calibration wheel would change significantly with each filter .. duh!
Here is a link to Spirit's rover specs
This story pissed me off so much I almost had a seizure... it's complete unadulterated bullsh*t. Here's how it works: the two cameras on the rover are BLACK AND WHITE CAMERAS. They don't see color. They're not designed to see color. They take GRAYSCALE images, through a series of COLOR filters. So what NASA ends up with are a series of black and white images with little tags on them that say "600nm" or "700nm". To give you an impression as to what it would look like "to us", they convert the black and white images to solid color; e.g. the B&W photo with a "red" tag is now just different shades of red. They take a series of these "color-grayscale" images in different regions of the spectrum, overlay them, and voila... a full-color image.
Once again.... THERE ARE NO "ORIGINAL" COLOR IMAGES, just black & whites shot through filter wheels. The best we can do is color transformations and approximations, to give you the best sense possible. As for the paranoid nonsense about the sundial/calibration target changing color, THAT'S SUPPOSED TO HAPPEN! What do you think a "calibration" target is??? You certainly wouldn't expect to see a bright blue spot if you looked at it through a red filter, would you? It will look different depending on what particular filters they used that day, and what color transforms they used to put it on the Internet.
Lastly, that bullcr*p about how the "sky should be blue" is just that---bullcr*p. Mars has almost no atmosphere, and what there is is filled with reddish dust. In the first horizon image we got from Mars (Viking), which the poster referenced, they screwed up the color transformation... it looked too red to be real so they fiddled with the data to make it "look right" [1]. They admitted it right away and all subsequent, peer-reviewed images have shown the correct, reddish sky.
[1] On Mars: Exploration of the Red Planet 1958-1978, p.384 (NASA History Series).
The sky is blue on earth because of the predominantly nitrogen atmosphere and the effect that atmosphere has on whole light; The so called "scattering" or defraction effect that someone else eluded to. The Atmosphere on Mars is predominately carbon dioxide, which would yield a different color from earth(I would suspect red-ish), plus a dab of blue for the nitrogen (second most abundant gas) and I'm not sure what for the Argon 40 isotope (third). Reddish-brown seems sensible to me. Tks.
I think the Nevada desert looks more like Mars than Mars does. I think they're staging it all on Mars and coloring it to look like Nevada.
Hey, this was funny the first time. And the second, I have to admit. And maybe the third. But when I read this every other day, it gets old. Can we stick to some sort of schedule for posting this, say every third space story?
Gates' Law: Every 18 months, the speed of software halves.
The Martian daytime sky is generally a butterscotch (yellow/brown) color. See NASA link here: http://humbabe.arc.nasa.gov/mgcm/faq/sky.html
Seems like they're working pretty quick over at JPL to get the colorized version of the images out to the general public, since this week, they've been releasing them less between 6 and 18 hours after receiving them. But if you're not happy with their coloration, then I invite those among the slashdot community who know such things to do it themselves.
The pan cam is black and white, and uses filters to pick out certain colors in the images it takes. If you want, you can read more about what filters are on which half of the pancam (l and r). There are 8 on a side, each with its own particular wavelength and bandpasses. The description of each as well as the numbering scheme is available from the Athena instruments website at Cornell University
The raw images are being freely distributed from the JPL MER website. You'll notice camera (l or r) and filter (1-8) used is described from the naming of the pancam files (eg. 2P126471535EDN0000P2303L6M1.JPG)
Just from this last days images, they have quite a few images in differant filters, of the color wheel itself, for calibration. For a better description of the filters themselves, and of the way they plan to (and have *BEGUN* to) calibrate the images, check out several differant publications. (thanks to JPL-Gene and doug_ellison of #maestro irc.freenode.net for the links).
I, for one, am thankful that they're releasing the raw data/images at all, considering the scale of the global-slashdotting currently going on. The speedy data turnaround, and amazing openness with which they are conducting this mission is really impressive compared to anything else of this scale. Thanks to everyone at JPL, Cornell, and NASA as a whole for all the incredible work from this meager enthusiast.
It's o.k. if you read it in a William Shatner voice.
Apparently Mars also creates a doppler effect. When the rover was moving towards Mars, it shifted the spectrum to the blue end. All of our pictures of a red mars proves that Mars is actually moving away from us.
It's so simple.
...you didn't learn english any better between Viking and now.
Hey folks, do a google search on a few key words of the above, like 'so many allegedly "educated" people' You will find a rich tapestry of trolls built off this same basic template. One link leads to a how-to-troll archive and guide. So, you fed the troll. Don't let it happen again.
What were you expecting?
All this guy gets is a Score of 1? What a crock of shit. This basically explains everything. No need to comment any further.
xrays ruin film
what's with everyone asking this story to be pulled? It might be a bizarre opinon, but it's interesting (350 comments and counting) and I've learnt a load of interesting stuff from the comments.
plus - I like that Slashdot Editors leave their mistakes to be seen. They'd leave yours. I hope that the reason that they don't *ever* pull stories is that that is a useful principle next time Microsoft leans on them to take comments down.
'This writing business. Pencils and what-not. Over-rated if you ask me. Silly stuff. Nothing in it' - Eeyore
As for overcast vs blue sky; dust in the atmosphere would not automatically stop sharp shadows, to do that it would have to be thick enough to completely diffuse the light source. Light on Earth get's scattered a lot in the atmosphere, enough to make the sky look blue, but the shadows are sharp. Turbidity could scatter other frequencies on Mars enough to make it look brown and still leave sharp shadows. So your argument is very uncompelling.
The color correction reminds me that NASA had to correctly set the white ballance on one of the Viking missions based on the appearance of a tube of known color they happened to spot on the lander. There are also a couple of ways of looking at this, there's adjustment for incident light color which may match what we'd perceive and then there's the actual color reflected which doesn't always match what we perceive but is a true spectral representation of the colors reaching the sensor. The first is what's considered normal color ballance, but either may be considered a resonable image. The latter would make the colors on the card very unlike those you'd see under white illumination.
Also bear in mind that some wavelengths of the incident light may be dramatically different than on Earth thanks to the atmosphere & dust (the same problem as above really) and if the spectral response from the color card may such that the resulting image could even be missing information needed to reconstruct the color, (that's actually a bit of a long shot IMHO).
In general the most disappointing thing about these images is the horrible stitching and reprojection that NASA has done. I'm not just talking about the near field where a rotating sensor (off center) might cause problems, but the entire image is awash with geometric missmatches even in the middle distance and out to the Horizon, which is just inexcusable. This really is attrocious image processing and rank amatures on Earth have done better with far fewer resources. NASA is making a complete mess of these images, but mostly it's the geometry that's a mess IMHO. Sood spectral callibration would be good too I agree, but I get the distinct impression that the 'A' team is not working on these puplic release images. Maybe these are just for initial release and they'll tidy the data up with more time & effort.
Right on, how insightful. After all, we wouldn't have given the billions of dollars that we did for the original normal color pictures they took out in the Mojave desert, would we? And it's certainly not the job of NASA to do good science and educate the people, they should be more like George Lucas and ILM and give people the crap they expect, not what's really there. Sure, change those colors. Edit those pictures, take out anything that might be disturbing. Outright lie about the resolution of the images. Make structures go away. You're so damn insightful.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
It basically says that small particles (such as most molecules in our atmosphere) reflect blue light more than red light because the wavelength is smaller at the blue end of the spectrum, comperable with the sizes of the molecules.
But Mars has a fair amount of dust in the atmosphere, and the particles are generally large enough so that the color reflected by them depends more on the composition of the dust than its size. The material is "magnetite", which absorbs blue light more than red. They say that without the dust, the martian sky would appear blue as it does on Earth. The link also provides true-color images.
Comments below indicate that the recent press release images were actually taken with infrared filters, so those images are false color no matter how we see them. Some of them are doctored to approximate true color and others are doctored to be too reddish. But the colors on the sundial are of no help since they are really being viewed in the infrared.
It seems that the general issue is that we want to know what the real colour of the sky is on Mars. Obviously, we must send a human to Mars to settle this argument.
The poster is German. I think he can be forgiven for a less-than-perfect command of English punctuation.
Welcome to the Internet, where not everybody is American.
If red is what we expect and if red is not, what it would look like, if I (or anybody else for that matter) were up there, could anybody please provide us with an idea of what we would see?
Are those dirty-looking pictures that google finds of the "mars-surface" more correct? Or have they been manipulated as well, because "we expect dirt-color"?
I don't think there is much point in arguing about it. Some GIMPing should do the trick, right?
And quit whining!! You obviously haven't thought your argument through, when you claim that it is "overcast" on Mars, yet Mars has no clouds!!!! Geeze...
You know, this works just as well and may even be more believable:
.. the next time you're out in the backyard exercising your Second Amendment rights, the conservatives will see it! These satellites are sensitive enough to tell the difference between a Colt .45 and a .38 Special! And when they detect you with a firearm, their computers cross-reference the address to figure out your name, and then an enormous database housed at the NSA is updated with information about you, a now known terrorist.
=====
It amazes me that so many allegedly "educated" people have fallen so quickly and so hard for a fraudulent fabrication of such laughable proportions. The very idea that a gigantic ball of rock happens to orbit our planet, showing itself in neat, four-week cycles -- with the same side facing us all the time -- is ludicrous. Furthermore, it is an insult to common sense and a damnable affront to intellectual honesty and integrity. That people actually believe it is evidence that the conservatives have wrested the last vestiges of control of our public school system from decent, God-fearing Americans (as if any further evidence was needed! Daddy's Stock options? God Almighty!)
Documentaries such as Enemy of the State have accurately portrayed the elaborate, byzantine network of surveillance satellites that the conservatives have sent into space to spy on law-abiding Americans. Equipped with technology developed by Handgun Control, Inc., these satellites have the ability to detect firearms from hundreds of kilometers up. That's right, neighbors
Of course, this all works fine during the day, but what about at night? Even the conservatives can't control the rotation of the Earth to prevent nightfall from setting in (only Joshua was able to ask for that particular favor!) That's where the "moon" comes in. Powered by nuclear reactors, the "moon" is nothing more than an enormous balloon, emitting trillions of candlepower of gun-revealing light. Piloted by key members of the conservative community, the "moon" is strategically moved across the country, pointing out those who dare to make use of their God-given rights at night!
Yes, I know this probably sounds paranoid and preposterous, but consider this. Despite what the revisionist historians tell you, there is no mention of the "moon" anywhere in literature or historical documents -- anywhere -- before 1950. That is when it was initially launched. When President Josef Kennedy, at the State of the Union address, proclaimed "We choose to go to the moon", he may as well have said "We choose to go to the weather balloon." The subsequent faking of a "moon" landing on national TV was the first step in a long history of the erosion of our constitutional rights by leftists in this country. No longer can we hide from our government when the sun goes down.
Sir Arthur C Clarke has made some very interesting statements:
"I'm fairly convinced that we have discovered life on Mars," Clarke told SPACE.com Sunday as Buzz Aldrin listened. "There are some incredible photographs from [the Jet Propulsion Laboratory], which to me are pretty convincing proof of the existence of large forms of life on Mars! Have a look at them. I don't see any other interpretation."
Also further down the page is a short discussion about NASA changing colors, with an interesting picture of mars from Hubble. Have a peek.
http://www.enterprisemission.com/sir.htm
-- Note: If you don't agree with me, don't bother replying. I won't read it.
How, many, commas, can, we, get, in, a, story,...
From excellent karma to terible karma with a single +5 funny post...
I just learned something. Thanks!
.sigs are for post^Hers.
A troll tried this earlier.
Holger Isenberg, the guy behind mars-news.de, is one of many kooks out there who are too ugly and interpersonally incompetent to ever hope to get laid in this life time. He must therefore resort to enclosing himself into his imaginary universe of in-bred conspiracy theories. enjoy.
NASA has always made raw data available to the public, which is what you can leverage thru the Maestro the software. The red tint observed in composite pictures made available to the public are, in fact, a fairly accurate representation of the truth. Pictures MUST be composited to be available in a JPEG format Joe Six Pack can look at in his browser, hence some level of alteration is necessary. There is no lie. There is no conspiracy. Even your average Joe Six Pack can grok the fact that some basic alterations are necessary to represent flat images. Otherwise Joe Six Pack can always download Maestro.
Extraordinary Vacations. Exceptional Prices
Color is a figment of your brain's imagination. In some situations, a proper white balance will make the picture closely match what your brain perceives (else people would have green skin under fluorescent lighting). In other situations (like sunsets), a proper white balance makes the picture look completely different from what your brain perceives.
This issue came up with the pictures from the Viking landers. The first pictures sent back, before color calibration, had a blue sky. IIRC the color correction NASA did wasn't a pure white balance, but something to more closely reflect how the scene would look to your eyes (and brain) if you were there.
You're right... I _knew_ I knew that style from somewhere.
.sigs are for post^Hers.
The next case of investigative journalism needs to be about false coloring of biological images!
Maybe Slashdot can pull off getting us one of thier famous interviews with a scientist working on this Mars mission? Maybe one of the project managers? Just a thought. I have no idea how hard that would be to pull off.
The original image of the sphynx looks completely black,it needed a lot of color correction and processing to have the classic alien face.
Thats because it was taken inside a studio, like the one they used to fakte the lunar landings.
Why do you think the european beagle2 failed, and the American didn't?
If you can't make it, fake it!
-H
If you turn off all the lights in your room and shine a red flashlight on a similar color calibration device, all the colors will be various shades of red! The human eye does perform some white-balancing on its own, but it will not go so extreme as balancing bright reds to white. It is perfectly possible that all the light near the rover on Mars is in the reddish wavelengths, and hence a human's eye (if a human were to stand there) would not totally adjust the colors, and things would actually look red!
Music speeds up when you yawn, but does not change pitch.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but don't we have blue sky because of light deflection of the blue OCEANS we have?
Mars' sky should be and is tinted RED/BROWN, based on light reflecting off the DIRT.
Submitter needs a quick lesson in, well, everything apparently.
Why didnt NASA just include a 18% gray card somewhere on the lander where the CCD can zoom to and calibrate? Hell, even my DSLR can calibrate on 18% gray card, or I can shoot a scenery with a
gray card in the background and use photoshop to calibrate on that "gray" area.
The elevation angle to the horizon from the rover is very low, meaning that you are looking through a large airmass. This means that you are looking at a much longer column of dust which scatters pink light, making the horizon look pink. The sky overhead may very well be dark blue, but NASA has not released many pictures of the sky above the rover.
an ill wind that blows no good
NASA's explination for the changes and need for image processing. I am still not sure the get it exactly right, but that's OK, neither is any one else.
Colorado. Desolate, cold, red all over. At least in the foothills.
- Dan
Consider yourself corrected.
Our oceans are blue because they reflect the sky.
-- This sig for rent.
The reason they fake the color is so that the sheep of the world do not become upset that it is not that red of a plannet.
AH MY GOD!!!!! RUN!!!!!!!!
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Dude, fuck off. It's getting annoying.
My lack of God, it's Trotsky!
Lets stop and think about this for a minute. All scientific photos coming from NASA are monochromatic at their heart. There is a reason for this. Color photography is a wasteful proposition. No matter how you take the photo, you are throwing away at least 2/3rds of your light. You also must quadruple the size of your sensor to gather the needed info at the same resolution as black and white. It makes a ton of sense why all the raw photos would be monochromatic.
Here is what I don't get. Why do they not publish them this way? The photos coming from mars are a complete lie as far as color is concerned. Seems to me that if you don't know what the colors really are, you should not show people an assumption then treat it as fact. Sure people oooh and aw over them, and they pictures follow what people expect to see. People also associate black and white with cheap 1950's tech. But what happens when we send a person to mars, and the sky is blue?
http://www.nei.ch/gallery/mars
here you'll find the true mars pictures, uncensored.
---
awake and alert!
-Penguin Mints
RIMMER: (VO) After intensive investigation, comma, of the markings on the alien pod, comma, it has become clear, comma, to me, comma, that we are dealing, comma, with a species of awesome intellect, colon. HOLLY: Good. Perhaps they might be able to give you a hand with your punctuation.
It appears that due to limited downlink bandwidth (since the HGA isn't fully up yet) they've been making the mosaics from a mix of left and right camera images.
Due to the different viewpoints (it looks likes they're a couple of feet apart) the mosaics have issues... but I suspect that once they downlink a full set of either left or right images the panorama will instantly get much much better.
--Rob
Nope. The sky is blue because of the atmosphere. The Sun's light hits the earth and bends round the atmosphere. Blue just happens to have the ideal wavelength so that it becomes the dominate color and that is what we see.
As for the ocean. Last I checked the ocean looks pretty black from space, except the shallows, but I'm not sure why those appear blue. Perhaps the other poster is correct that it reflects the sky.
At any-rate, there you have it.
-Mark
Dovie'andi se tovya sagain.
Ok well maybe that's true then..
But you'll never get me to believe that the white from snow doesn't stick to the bottom of leaves of grass, where its eaten by cows and comes out in the milk!
Nice job with the random placement of commas, it really adds to the flow of your words!
I was always under the impression that the oceans are actually only blue in that they reflect the sky, which is blue because of light refraction. *shrug*...
http://mars-news.de/color/blue.html
But, as pointed out here, if it was red dust storms rather than NASA hanky-panky that turned these pictures red, then the sundial would not have that shadow. The bottom line is we are getting false information. Only an idiot would make fun of the person who points out with good science that the information is false and tries to offer theories about why that is happening. rather than test the thoeries or try to determine why the information is false themselves.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
That's a whole light brighter than being inside a typical office building with flourescent lights.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
I meant "imbue", not "ibue". How about a "Submit with spell check" option?
But Mars is not lit by a laboratory-calibrated white light source. It's got an atmosphere and lots of dust which changes the color of sunlight. So completely color correcting the pictures against a color grid will actually produce a picture very different from how it'd look to our eyes.
I definitely agree that the mosaics are a bit rough, but I'd *much* rather see a rough mosaic *today* than a polished one two weeks from now. I have faith that we'll get both.
For news, status, updates, scientific info, images, video, and more, check out:
Mars Exploration Rover Highlights (AXCH).
Human eyes are pretty good at white-balancing whatever the current ambient lighting is to make sure we what we see doesn't become all red or all yellow or whatever. We can tell red from blue under sunlight, incandescent lights, and fluorescents. The only thing I've seen that totally turns off my color vision (other than darkness) is sodium streetlamps, presumably because they put out only one frequency.
Ambient lighting on Mars is probably pretty far from what is normal on Earth. To tell what Mars would actually look like to us on Mars, somebody might need to do some special testing of the responsiveness of human eyes under that ambient lighting.
This has more to do with lighting conditions and filters in the studio where all of these images, probes and moon landings are produced.
Some stage hand forget to put the same filters on the spots that were used in the original images.
'Real'.... hahaha....
Every Hubble image I've seen of deep-sky objects not only says that the image is false-color, they will say in the caption somewhere what colors represent what. Sometimes, blue will represent IR, or maybe green represents oxygen and red hydrogen, etc.
Just because people aren't reading the caption doesn't mean the info is not disclosed. I suppose NASA could put big block letters across the image saying THESE COLORS ARE A FAKE!!!! but that's not likely.
Also, unfortunately the image standards of the world don't tend to have the colorspace to properly cause your monitor to emit high resolution ultraviolet or x-ray images, so a little false coloring is necessary to impart the information.
Well, as others have mentioned, it's sort of difficult to get a decent color match given the images from the cameras and that for public relations photos it doesn't matter much anyway. However, I did compare color wheel on the two pictures side by side and it's at least somewhat interesting. Take a look at it here.
There is no grammatical reason, why the poster has a comma in their post.
Several people have explained what's going on, and even quoted the press conference where this was discussed. One of the other points from that same press conference was that the pigments of the calibration target were carefully chosen so that each is useful for multiple filters. That sounds strange if you think about the pancams like a pocket digital, but they're not. They use a filter wheel, so each wavelength images all of the calibration target. By making each "color" on the target cover multiple wavelengths they get more information. I think the specific example was that the blue target shows up as bright white to the near-IR filter they were using. The result is that in the *composite* they are wacky colors, since the aggregate of the calibrations doesn't "make sense".
/. with no editorial review.
In other exciting news, this morning they showed some of the mini-TES (thermal emission spectrometer) images. That data is very hard to interpret, so it is ripe for crackpot articles that can be posted on
It is a well known fact that the "Moon" doesn't even exist, much less "Mars". And We all know where the pyramids came from, dont we ? Just ask MacGyver, uh sorry, Colonel O'Neill.
Now the world has gone to bed, Darkness won't engulf my head, I can see by infra-red, How I hate the night.
are we talking about the colours of the photos, when this guy has much better things on his page, we can discuss, like:
- Space travel in the old Indian Mahabharata Epos
- Was Viking 2 hit by a projectile?
- The connection between Mars and Star Wars Episode 1
- Ruins of acient cities on Mars
- Another(sic!) fiveside pyramide on Mars
You all seem to miss the really important things here!
Ok, wether or not NASA does false colorization of the pictures I cannot tell.
However it IS well known among scientists that does not base their work at false colored pictures that the martian sky is red at day, and blue at sunset/sunrise. It really doesn't take that long time with google to
find some facts from trusted sources on thatone.
Just downloaded the NASA panorama and adjusted it using Keyhole's custom tools. The color corrected image looks much better after careful color processing. (Here is a smaller version if the original is too large for you.)
Be seeing you, Seer
Actually, due to the phenomenon known as redshift, most of the outer regions of the universe are becoming redder as we speak. Mars is just a local example of that tendency. We definitely need to alert our government about this communist threat!!!
(with credit to Science Made Stupid, a brilliant book that everyone should read)
Loking at the first released high definition color pic, I can see that the image is actually a bunch of images side by side. Fine, I knew that, but what a crappy work! I can imagine what amazing work they are doing with the colors. Really.
I shot the sheriff
The moderators have been trolled. Bravo!
They also add random stars in the backgrounds of images, just so we knew we're lookign at space.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
The title is "Alternative Areology and Archeology"
Areology?
The study of areolae?
"Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives" should be a convenience store, not a government agency.
In other exciting news, this morning they showed some of the mini-TES (thermal emission spectrometer) images. That data is very hard to interpret, so it is ripe for crackpot articles that can be posted on /. with no editorial review.
So well said, I think it should be in bold.
Yet more NASA bullshit. They didn't go the the moon, and they didn't go to Mars.
They should employ some hollywood FX guys. At least they wouldn't get caught out so often.
Unfortunately, this troll does NOT work as well from a liberal point of view. Conservatives are more apt than liberals to use these sweeping and exagerated arguments with little or no basis. Conservatives espouse their religious beliefs and rights to their audience more readily and ferociously than do liberals. Probably the greatest reason this troll does not convert to a conservative myth is that liberals are far more conserned with controlling the spread and use of firearms within our own (US) borders while conservatives fervently defend their right to own and bear arms.
To my first point, I refer you only to the radio airwaves. Rush Limbaugh is just one of many conservative voices that will enlighten and inform listeners as to the ways in which the liberal leadership of this country has fouled up the whole works by ripping the power from the people and putting it in the hands of the government. I cannot think of a single liberal media mogul that uses these tactics. Liberal media voices tend to be more satirical and sarcastic, prefering to trivialize the other side as oppose to demonize them. Al Franken is a prime example of this modality.
As for the "God-fearing" tone of this troll, a liberal will tell you that "religion and politics don't mix." Out of the past five presidents, we have only one example (that I can recall) of the president's religion having a very strong voice in guiding public policy. That president is the current Bush. His religious views on abstinence, life, and general moral righteousness has had more impact on our laws than Clinton's lack of morality in committing adultery. He has enacted "abstinence only" sexual education programs, banned a type of abortion procedure, and waged war on the "evil doers" of the world whom happen to be largely muslim.
Finally, the issue surrounding the supposed purpose of this balloon: to observe and track the movement, use, and ownership of firearms. The right to own and bear arms is spelled out in the Bill of Rights and is considered by most conservatives to be a God-given right. Liberal legislation has placed limits on the purchase of firearms both in terms of who may own firearms and the types of firearms that can be privately owned. Staunch conservatives like to quote Charleton Heston's "cold dead hand" comments on gun control, whereas liberals feel the need to protect the citizenry from the dangers of guns by removing the threat.
Therefore, the main tenants of this troll are very conservative-based and anti-liberal. They cannot have "liberal" substituted with "conservative" and still be valid. The entire argument would need a re-write to include emotional arguments and tangible evidence to show that it is really a conservative plot to do X, where X is not track the use of firearms. At this point, the troll would fall apart due to a lack of real evidence that the moon is really a man-made satelite put in place to track liberal ideals.
None of this is to say that Liberals do not have their own conspiracy theories. This just is not one of them.
on SNL:
More.... Cowbell!!...
(sorry. Not enough Beer.)
In film we generally throw in a flesh tone shot to help in color timing. It's like the meteric conversion problem. The green flesh tones of the martians in those unreleased shots are throwing off the calibration for the other shots. There'll be a lot of red faces when they figure this one out.
Photographs in newspapers and magazines are also color corrected.
I have a website. It's about Macs.
With high-end digital cameras, there are three seperate CCDs. I don't know if thats the case here, or if they use one 3 times in sequence.
Than an entire palate of 'em:
i t/20040109a/minites-box-A7R1.jpg
http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/press/spir
I suggest some people here perform an experiment. Take a lamp and cover it with transparent red plastic. Go into a dark room, taking a blue object and a green object with you. Turn on the light. What colors do you see?
Please forgive me for resposting almost the same thing as the last time this came up, but the guy is wrong.
I don't know anything about the martian atmosphere, but plenty about photography and photoshop. His "corrected" images are way too cyan. The cyan cast dulls the image making it appear too flat. Things that should be clean have a dull light blue colour to them. Look at any photo shot outside on earth on a sunny day. Highlights are white, not blue.
Any photo has a sweet spot where you get maximum vibrancy across all the colous. You can clearly see in his earlier examples that the NASA image is much richer and more satisfying than his. That, to my mind, makes it "better". BUT, you have to remember that there is no 100 % correct colour to be found in photography. Film and CCDs work very differently than the human eye. The human eye compensates for vast colour and brightness differences no artificial sensor can handle. Photography of any kind is only an approximation. That the martian sky is red, or blue of butterscotch can only be definitively settled by the first pair of human eyes that has a look. In the meantime, all I have to do to confim the surface of mars is reddish is to go outside and have a look. It looks red to me.
With all due respect, this guy reminds me of the nazi dentist in the Kurt Vonnegut book that "proved" Jesus was an aryan by careful study of His teeth in mideval paintings.
...but doesn't the pictures look computer rendered?
Hofstadter's Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even if you take into account Hofstadter's Law
When he stepped out of the Capricorn One module to snap the pic?
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, it doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
I knew the earth was flat.
Are you telling me all the rocks on mars are NOT blue on one side and red on the other?
The scientists just haven't had enough time to oversee the photoshopped photos of the set. Just ask the original Capricorn 1 crew, the management can slip up in a number of ways. The next set should have the appropriate difussers over the stage lights. The next "lander" should be 100% CGI if the Capricorn group can pull it all together.
- Tjp
I am in wallow with my inner money grubbing capitalistic pig. ... Oink!
This guy's saying that artifacts from zooming in way past the level of detail actually obtained using some type of linear falloff are pyramids! This is about at funny as the "face" on Mars people.
Kooks. They seem to know enough to know better but some people like fairy tales better than reality.
Yes, space images are usually in fake colors. But most of the images you see involve "invisible" light (light that is ouside the range of visible frequencies). For example, I wouldn't like it if they used the "correct" colors for pictures from X ray telescopes... even if it were possible :) Similarly you can't see infrared or ultraviolet or most other frequencies of light.
True-color pictures of space will be pretty much limited to the solar system because that range of light is blocked more easily by dust. To see really far away (and far back in time) we have to consider the color shifting. Is the "correct" color the shifted color as we would see it now, or the corrected color with the motion subtracted out? Neither one is more correct than the other.
So don't be so paranoid. Most technical pictures use colors in funny ways. The only valid complaint about it is when they don't disclose what the colors mean. (Though NASA usually is good about this... you just have to dig around for the information.)
The JPL news conference covered by CSPAN last night explained in serious detail why it was done the way it was done and the benefits. It is easy to tell, given the color references on the robot which filter is in use.
I, for one, am tired of conspiracy under every rock. It is time for slashdot to grow up just a tiny bit and be willing to recognize that the USA can sometimes do cool things that no one else has done. It is rocket science and the USA can sometimes do it better than anyone.
-- Multics
P.S. see here for the hardware details. It is only 2 pages for the typical /. A.D.D. reader.
Yes you are absolutely correct that the human visual system corrects for tinted lights by adjusting the "whitepoint".
But that works in pictures too... so NASA shouldn't be taking it into account when reproducing colors from spectrums.
In fact, we've known accurate methods for converting from wavelength intensity spectrums to the color perceived by a human since the 1930's (CIE standardized color spaces), and we've known how to convert that perceived color (xyz) into an RGB tristimulus for nearly as long.
So NASA can (as does as far as I know) produce accurate colors to the extent it can without knowing the exact xyz colors of your monitor's phospers, the gamma response curve for each electron gun in your monitor, and the whitepoint of the light in the room you are sitting.
It would only be possible to reproduce "perfect" (still can't product colors ouside of the monitor's gamut) if all that information was known.
Yep, and you can model that quite effectively. Check out www.geomantics.com - the GenesisII program actually models the earth's atmosphere which ends up blue because of the model diffraction. The base colour used is black.
For those of you who studied chemistry, remember that oxygen scatters blue light, hence Earth's blue sky.
e /c limate_history/general_circulation_of_the_atmosphe re1.html
Mars has less than 1 percent oxygen in it's atmosphere. Mar's atmosphere is 1 percent of our's.
Hmmmm.... maybe the sky on Mar's ISN'T blue, except in Totall Recall.
http://calspace.ucsd.edu/marsnow/library/scienc
As for the different collage shades, f-stop changes with different light conditions at different angles and NASA (sloppily) put the thing together, or they were being rigorously truthfull.
Or it's all a government plot.
Excuse my spelling, I'm a scientist.
mmmmm...
butterscotch...
(drool)
I can't be the only PDF hater out there, can I?
The description of each as well as the numbering scheme is available from the Athena instruments website at Cornell University
For a better description of the filters themselves, and of the way they plan to (and have *BEGUN* to) calibrate the images, check out several different publications.
(yes, the "publications" link was HTML in the parent, but I've kept it in anyway).
not that the science is any better.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
...on the last ten Mars articles where people posted nearly the exact same joke.
Last week I was monkeying with color on a digital photo of a rock and decided to rescale the colors. For each pixel in each layer (red, green, blue) I computed new value = 1.1 times origonal value minus 4 and thought that I was being clever. The color mostly looked better except that the magenta on the color bar turned puke green. After tearing out a lot of hair I realized that I was using *bytes* and that when the computer evaluates 16 minus 17 the answer is 255. I converted my array to integer and then truncated less than zero to zero and more than 255 to 255 and presto!
I hope that NASA is not breaking in some green programers with thier processing software.
No, I'm not talking about your punctuation. Remember: Exit Only.
Below are two Slashdot article on Maestro, the program NASA uses to control and recieve data from the rover.
Article on Maestro Program
Latest data update from NASA to get the pictures
hmmmm.
I have a question. Why is slashdot publishing pseudoscience "news" under the guise of science? For shame.
It is kind of arrogant to assume that every creature sees things with a human eye color balance.
I watched a press meeting at NASA Tv. Actually, the rover has 8 filters on each camera, with only a few in common (also, one of them is a sun filter, so the rover can figure out it's orientation and direct it's antenna to earth). The blue pigment on the sundial is specially selected because it also has a strong infrared signature. So if you watch the blue spot with the infrared filter, the "blue" spot turns out red. Another mistery solved.
"It's too bad that stupidity isn't painful." - Anton LaVey
... for fuck's sake, lay off the conspiracy theories.
Don't forget, the air pressure on Mars is less than 1% of Earth's. With an atmosphere that thin, it would take a ferocious gale to whip up a dust storm, no matter how fine the dust is. Likewise, it should settle quickly, as there's really very little air to hold it bouyant.
step 1) take photos of mars step 2) replace colors to make things appear red step 3) ? step 4) make lots of money.
-Cnik
The real color of mars is a gigantic bland flesh-tone, but that was getting blocked by too many web filters.
Take a look at his web site...he's nuttier than a bottle of Planter's Peanuts!
I worked (from MIT) with Viking Lander data, not camera data, but I followed all of this closely at the time and had lots of discussions with people at JPL about this and other topics.
The Viking landers used a scanning (spot) camera, which was slow but which was also one of the first really good scientific cameras sent on a space probe. It was designed to provide a very repeatible color readout of what it saw, but, like most such cameras, was subject to drift, so color calibration targets were included on top of each lander.
When Viking Lander 1 landed, the first color pictures released had a blue sky. These were done with the color balance adjusted "by eye" at JPL. When they had time to analyze the color targets, they released that they had made a mistake, and that the sky was red.
I specifically remember hearing that they had adjusted the color balance in the first release image, and had to adjust it back to get true color.
They had no reason to lie and were a little embarassed to have made the initial mistake.
So I regard thiis article as being without merit.
As a very well-known Japanese Sailor is renowned to have said, a few paltry decades ago : "Oh! Oh! ... Horrywoo'd!".
Wheres the one that looks like Tux?
right here.
It's been hard keeping it online because the government now has beams weapons that can penetrate not just aluminum foil hats, but aluminum server cases as well.
I completely agree that my previous post lacked precision and was misguiding. There are a lot of conditions that determine the colour of a planet's sky, and I don't have those required informations for Mars, so I went and downloaded Maestro. The colored pictures taken with the PANCAM that are available where assembled from seperate channel pictures then corrected using filter response data. Here's the result. I upped the contrast a bit. Mars' sky is light blue.
Maybe we deserve this world ?
I figured this would happen, bad color images and bad mosaic seams making JPL look bad. However, don't blame JPL. Check out some of the B&W mosaics, almost undetectable seams. What's going on? Cornell has told JPL not to do anything with color images, they will handle all color press releases. As you can see, with color mosaics with horizontal seams that show the same rocks two and three times and color on the calibration target that shows all the color tabs as shades of red, Cornell's software isn't up to JPLs. I figure that eventualy with enough sharp-eyed reporters and slashdotters, that word will get back to NASA and Cornell, cooler heads will prevail and politics will recede.
Oh come on !
This was definately a "5"!
So funny it made me search out Walter E. Williams Gift of amnesty against American caucasians of European descent:
The mo' colors - the mo' better!
~Mookie in Spike Lee's: "Do the Right Thing".
Stuff that matters.
Like the original poster, I too was offended by this obvious attempt to falsify evidence. I much prefer the authentic blue-ish and lavender-ish tints I remember of Mars from the last time I was there.
I think you made it sound like colonization just to mess with us
The mods are oppressing my right to post, I will fly a plane into their karma when I meta mod Ganesh Allah willing.
Mars my pahtootie. I'm pretty good at recognizing a digital picture when I've seen it before . Those photos aren't from Mars but from the Wright Valley, Antartica.
See for yourself!
http://www.msss.com/http/ant/4.gif
Air scatters blue light more, thus the normal sky color. Dust scatters orange and reds which is why pollution makes pretty sunsets and why Mars' sky is more red than Earths'. But it isn't realy red unless there is a dust storm to kick up the rusty Martian dirt.
On one of his pages , he abbreviates the word "see" as s. I believe this is the first time I have seen this - it could be indicative of an ancient civilization corrupting the English dictionary via a computer-to-human transmissible virus broadcast back to earth by Mars rover Spirit once it fell pray to the Demon of Mars (which, incidentally, is also red)!
Must-not-watch TV!
The image detector get spatial information down to the pixel size. Unfortunately, minimum-size features rarely line up exactly with the detector's pixels: a high-contrast feature one pixel wide is usually seen as a lower-contrast feature two pixels wide. Mathematically it's equivalent to convolving the feature with the pixel angular sensitivity. Deconvolution is the inverse process that turns the pixelized data back into the original features. (More or less. The process makes assumptions so it doesn't always get it exactly right, but you do get more spatial data for typical images.)
-- ;-)
Kuro5hin.org: where the good times never end.
While people may be sheep that is not why they "fake" the color. The real reason is they don't have filters corresponding to the human primary colors (and those aren't quite red green and blue). In fact, they don't even have many filters which only let through visible light. And they don't have the same filters on both cameras. And they have no way of obtaining three primaries at the same time. This means they have to "fake" the colors, "fake" the picture (it's actually multiple pictures), and that it is too complicated to explain to sheep. Thus, they only explain it in detail on their website and in QA sessions with the public ;)
SPURT SPURT SPURT
I grew up in Southern Africa at an altitutde of around 1500 meters (somewhere near 5000 feet) above sea level. I remember the sky of my childhood being a dark deep blue. Take a loof at the pictures taken at the top of K2 or everest, or even better, if you can find them, colour images of the X-15 experimental planes of the 60s. At that altitude where the X-15 is soon after launch, close to 30'000 meters (100'000 feet) the sky is almost black.
That is, as most of know, because the very low air density at higher altitudes refracts far less light.
The average surface air density on Mars is more or less the same as it is on Earth at 30'000 meters. That means that the sky on Mars will probably be almost black with a small band of colour on the horizon.
That band of colour will be due to so called rayleigh scattering, by which air molecules scatter the light passing through them. Oxygen and Nitrogen on earth, being small molecules will scatter light of a smaller wavelength (blue) than on mars, where the atmosphere is mostly carbon dioxide. The light thus produced on mars will be NOT be red and NOT be blue but somewhere in the middle (yellow/brown) as the larger carbon dioxide molecules will scatter light of larger wavelengths than on earth, but not enough to make the light seem red as that would require a gas of larger molecules such as methane or propane which, of course, is the main atmospheric component on Titan, saturns moon, and lo and behold, we get a deep orange light there.
It strikes me that I read in the 'instruments' section that the panoramic cameras are equipped with 8 filters each, for a total of 11 distinct filters.
For example - I think they show a picture of a sun shot taken on sol 1, clearly through welder's-glass sorts of filters. The sky looks black in that shot.
I'm not clear on what frequencies the CCDs can capture, and the filter used was not indicated. What if the filter is allowing in near-infrared, or eliminating parts of the spectrum?
Or they could be twiddling the colours, who knows.
I'm still trying to figure out how he thought this up long before the 1976 Viking "Face on Mars"
photo.
http://www.noguchi.org/mars269.htm
It's amazing how many of you crawl out of the woodwork on a question like this pretending to know anything about this. Why doesn't someone just ask the Spirit mission scientists what they are doing?
In truth, there are probably a half dozen likely ways in which the image could turn out all red. None of you knows for sure, so stop acting so authoritative.
They are idiots for not including normal color lenses and filters for sterioscopic shots. Is it so hard to believe that real people want to see what it would look like if they were standing there? That's the shot that pays the bills. All fasle color images of any sort should be stamped "false color". On top of that each digital photo should contain color meta data relevent to the photos. This is the reason a expensive manned mission is necessary to keep funds available for such science. An astronaught has the lay intelegence to take an everyday camcorder that records visable light for the touristy pictures that pays the ticket to get him there. Scientists can't get their heads out of their asses long enough to stop looking at numbers and instead use their eyes to appreciate the awe and presence of the world around them. This is why NASA is in the crapshoot and will remain there; they neither the heart nor the childlike lust for adventure and exploration. Let's keep the nerds here and send some some men and women with some cement and a little champagne and some beers that know how to party after they have built a monument for the occasion.
1. Budget for manned Mars mission approved = 2.3 zillion
2. Spend some on fake mission with old Star Wars props in Tunisian desert = 23 million
3. Profit! 2.3z - 23m = 2.3z!
(Now use huge slush fund for War on Whatever)
"Don't belong. Never join. Think for yourself. Peace." V.Stone, Microsoft Corporation
From the url:
http://mars-news.de/life/0022120022.gif Oh yeah, an animal made of foil. And they are friends of NASA too (along with the pyramid makers).
http://mars-news.de/life/0022120014a_965.gif Did NASA told George to create JarJar to please their martian friends?
Why, do you, use commas in places, where they are not, needed?
Sorry, I don't mean to come off as a flamer, but here is an exerpt from the post:
"There is no scientific reason, why JPL is colorizing Mars in that dull red tint as in their press release images. In the latest panorama image, there is a hint, that they deliberately altered the colors, as the blue and green spots on the color calibration target (the sundial) suddenly converted to bright red and brown."
Don't need a single comma in any of it, yet you have four. Makes for extremely fragmented reading.
My
Limekiller
They should have used the Gimp instead of PhotoSoap, or Adobe!
OH THE SHAME I fell off the wagon and use sigs again!
anyone interested in trying a less complicated version of this should check out the color theoritician Josef Albers. He taught at yale for many years and his color theories are used world wide in teaching art students about colors... His book Interaction of Color has exercises that deal with this very subject... Yale university press even made a CD-Rom with some of his exercises on them.
3 00 018460/qid=1073735991//ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i0_xgl14/002 -5141999-2232038?v=glance&s=books&n=507846
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0
or you can check
http://www.albersfoundation.org/
I've done a bit of experimenting with these files, comparing the colour wheel to the images taken on Earth, and in order to get a reasonable approximation of the 'true colours', you need the L4, L5, and L6 filters, for red, green and blue respectively. Ironically, the main problem is that there aren't yet pictures using the red filter. A lot of the images triplicated with the blue green and infrared images. (L6, 480; L5 530; L2 750)
The use of the L2 infrared filter means that the blue colours are oversampled (at least on the colour chart). Once the L4 filter images are used on the planet, full colour images will be ours.
-- IANAL, BIPOOTV
These are the face on Mars people.
This is a very important discussion to have and I appreciate the information, but homebody needs to get his usage of commas straight. I first noticed it in the slashdot story:
"There is no scientific reason, why JPL is colorizing Mars..."
This should simple be, "There is no scientific reason why JPL is colorizing Mars". I was willing to let that one go, because it seems that sentences any more complex than object-verb-subject confuse a lot of people and they feel there's no harm in tossing a comma in there to chop things up a little. They're wrong, but I've gotten used to it. It annoys me, but I try not to criticize it too much.
So then I clicked on the link to his site about it, and found the following headline:
"The day, JPL stole the true blue"
You're kidding me. You don't really think there should be a comma there, do you? This is a textbook example of somebody adding a comma ANYWHERE there is more than subject-verb-object in a sentence. "JPL stole the true blue" is a very basic, completely unconfusing sentence. But add "the day" to it and it's causes the dizziness to come back, doesn't it? It's so overwhelming that we must insert commas to keep the senses.
Wrong. The comma shouldn't be there. And yes, it is very distracting to those of us who know.
RP
The NASA site explicitly says what filters the camera is using. If the only light that comes into the shutter is red, then you can only see varying shades of reflected red light.
HELLOOOOOOO, Ares2003, you're, DAFT.
Speaking from experience (and posting anonymously in this case), I have been surprised at how polarized the Slashdot community is about this aspect of the Bush administration. One can make at least plausible arguments that every initiative of the administration has contained provisions whose sole purpose is to ensure financial benefits for large corporations within select industries, or the large shareholders of such corporations. This leads one to speculate that a program to put people on the moon or Mars might succeed or not, but in either case, would be structured to ensure profits for the companies doing the work. Making those arguments seems to produce a lot of moderation activity from both sides. I have been surprised by the fact that so many people feel strongly enough about it to use mod points. At my last count, sentiment was running -17 (flamebait, troll) to 13 (insightful).
For those of you who didn't remember, Slashdot posted links to the first images released from Spirit.
As you can see, this image is not optimized for viewing as the rest of the images have been because NASA was in a hurry to get the first images out to the public.
telnet://zombiemud.org:3000
I managed to grab some analog-transmitted images from Beagle 2 and Mars Polar Lander. The sky is BLACK. Pure black. Everything else is also.
Table-ized A.I.
So, should I tell what I have heard from a former member of the image processing team during Viking?
He was in the team at Ames which created true color images (same colorization as my images) after they saw teh badly red colorized ones from JPL.
"When X send the pictures to the viking imaging director at JPL, a note came back saying that his face went white after seeing these images. Later at the press conference before christmas '76, that director critized one of the AMES guys of having showed these true color blue skies pictures to the press."
And there are other whitnesses telling the very same story! For example Ron Leven, son of Gilbert Levin, Primary Investigator of Viking labeled release experiment!
Read his words on http://www.mufor.org/dipietro3.html
YHBT
If you check the RGB values of the red part of the colour calibrator that should be blue, its pretty obvious that someone's 'painted' the calibration chart to screw up any reverse filtering Run this simple check on the pads, ignore the outer few pixlels, those values will be altered by teh jpeg compresion firstly, lets check the top right filter, the green one, The GREEN PAD varies from around 93 to 51 on the outer edge Blue hovers around 17-20 red hovers around 98-100 BLACK PAD, (bottom left) red goes from 51 to 79, green from 20 to 36 blue from 5 to about 10! RED PAD(top right) red hovers between 120-125 green 76-81 blue 23-28 BLUE PAD (bottom right) red 178-179 green 32-36 blue 29-31 WHY is there such a reduced spread of colours on this particular pad, when the others (with exception of the red) show a bigger spread. WHY is the blue content spread of ALL the pads SIGNIFICANLTY reduced compared to the other values WHY is the spread on the black pad so marked for the Red and Green, but not for blue ...forgive me for being cynical, but i would hve thought, looking at this, that the blue component had been compressed and reduced, and a red blob painted over the blue pad!
How about this? First Lady: Net News Needs Scrutiny
-ccm
Too much Law; not enough Order.
Could you post images with the color corrected?
Bob Clark
"I've done a bit of experimenting with these files, comparing the colour wheel to the images taken on Earth, and in order to get a reasonable approximation of the 'true colours', you need the L4, L5, and L6 filters, for red, green and blue respectively. Ironically, the main problem is that there aren't yet pictures using the red filter. A lot of the images triplicated with the blue green and infrared images. (L6, 480; L5 530; L2 750)
i ri t/20040108a/PIA05018_br.jpg
The use of the L2 infrared filter means that the blue colours are oversampled (at least on the colour chart). Once the L4 filter images are used on the planet, full colour images will be ours.
-- IANAL, BIPOOTV"
This still doesn't explain why the image of the sundial has the colors looking perfectly fine including the green and blue.
It's only the images that also show the surface or sky that wind up with the wrong colors for the calibration targets on the sundial.
Are you saying this image of the sundial was taken without using the red filter:
http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/press/sp
Bob Clark
What is important is that blues are mapped to "image" red and greens are mapped to image "orange". This cannot be reversed or colorised to something else since this process is one way. With pictures of stars it is irrevelent since there is far less to see. For instance the jpg images now contain "sky" information in the red band of the image with all the other red spectral data "mixed in" - thus it appear red now. And the green band is now part of the yellow and red ends of the spectra(looks like the dirt. It no longer is part of the green band and is blended with the these other colours. The blue sky and the green "shrubbey" can not be restored since there is now no way to separate the two types of image. Once you scramble an egg you can't unscramble it without the original data. All I can suggest is to use the original Maestro pan images that will be released today and it should have all the data you need... provided that they include the target in the image as well. Lets hope this is not fiddled data and we can finally see what mars looks like. You will have to "do-it-yourself".
No - these calibration images are taken with the L4, L5, L6 filters. There are images of the color wheel in all the filters (L1-7, R1-7), but very limited ones of the surface/sky in anything but L2, L5 and L6. In fact, there are now L4 images available. The true colour sky looks white, but does seem to have a greenish tinge to it.
You can try this yourself if you have an imaging program that lets you use RGB colour channels. If you put color wheel images using L2 in red, L5 in green and L6 in blue, and move back to full colour, it looks nothing like the images you linked to. Blue looks bright pink-purple. If you use L4, L5, and L6, the colours come out just like that image you showed. Most of the posted colour images are colourised using the three main imaging filters (L2, L5, and L6), because those are the mainly used ones. It makes sense, the image quality is better, but one down side is that it doesn't give you as close a real colour as the L4 filter does.
I urge you to try it, as it's great fun... but then I'm a dork.
-- IANAL, BIPOOTV
"No - these calibration images are taken with the L4, L5, L6 filters. There are images of the color wheel in all the filters (L1-7, R1-7), but very limited ones of the surface/sky in anything but L2, L5 and L6. In fact, there are now L4 images available. The true colour sky looks white, but does seem to have a greenish tinge to it.
E R. sff_RS103_20040110150347.html
You can try this yourself if you have an imaging program that lets you use RGB colour channels. If you put color wheel images using L2 in red, L5 in green and L6 in blue, and move back to full colour, it looks nothing like the images you linked to. Blue looks bright pink-purple. If you use L4, L5, and L6, the colours come out just like that image you showed. Most of the posted colour images are colourised using the three main imaging filters (L2, L5, and L6), because those are the mainly used ones. It makes sense, the image quality is better, but one down side is that it doesn't give you as close a real colour as the L4 filter does."
Thanks for the response. Where do you locate the individual filter images with the labeled data about which wavelength they represent?
Also, I can understand that with scientific observations the near-infrared might be very useful, but it seems to me for an image to be released to the news media for public relations the red filter would be used to give the most accurate color rendition of the surface.
For the released color images you mention using the correct L4 filter are you referring ones visible here:
http://apnews.myway.com/image/20040110/MARS_ROV
Bob Clark
Without seeing this topic here on Slashdot (though, many sites are carrying it), I came acoss an explanation of this color issue and Slashdot was kind enough to post it today. Direct link to the site with the explanation: http://www.atsnn.com/story/30048.html Slashdot story: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/01/19/125820 2&mode=thread&tid=134&tid=160
Look here:
i t. html
http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/all/spir
An image file is names like this:
2P127603030EFF0309P2542L2M1.JPG
That L2 at the end shows that this is an L2 filter, and you need to find three pictures that looks the same, but have L4, L5, and L6.
-- IANAL, BIPOOTV