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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.
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.
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.
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.
...it would be more likely that the public would realize that they're just filming this whole shebang out in the Utah desert.
It's a conspiracy. To make people...
BELIEVE THAT MARS IS RED!
Thanks for alerting us to that potential communist menace, senator.
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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!
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)
Catering to it is no better than being an advocate of the conspiracy theories in the first place.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
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.
I don't think this has been addressed on it yet, but a good reference for these sorts of claims is Bad Astronomy.
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 I want to know is:
Why does the Spirit rover have an Atari game console joystick installed on it?
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.
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...
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.
I'm sure glad my taxes are being spent reinforcing people's incorrect beliefs instead of being wasted on education and elightenment.
The real Ralph Yarro posts as Anonymous Coward. Anyone else is an impostor.
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
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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!
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."
...in an altered hue.
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.
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?
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
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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 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.
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?
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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
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.
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
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
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.
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!
Well, if you want a close up view just piss off the Godfather galaxy. I hear he once put the horsehead nebula on a now defunct galaxy's pillow.
WWJD.... for a Klondike bar?
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.
If you use KDE, fire up KStars - you can do raw database transactions and pull DSS images by right clicking anywhere. Nifty. Then click on a nebula and compare the original to the HST image. It's pretty obvious they are clarifying and not adding anything to the original.
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
I have a question. Why is slashdot publishing pseudoscience "news" under the guise of science? For shame.
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.
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.
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.
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.