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The Real Reason why Spirit Only Sees Red
use_compress writes To produce a color photograph, the rover's panoramic camera takes three black-and-white images of a scene, once with a red filter, once with a green filter and once with a blue filter. Each is then tinted with the color of the filter, and the three are combined into a color image.
In assembling the Spirit photographs, however, the scientists used an image taken with an infrared filter, not the red filter (NYTimes, Free Registration Required). Some blue pigments like the cobalt in the rover color chip also emit this longer-wavelength light, which is not visible to the human eye."
'Aha! So that's why they don't see little green men...' - at last, the dream of aliens living on Mars is alive again.
They mention slashdot.org by name.
Could this be some sort of revenge?
It's a good job the pictures aren't coming back with a blue tint, or lynch mobs would be turning up at NASA HQ.
If I seem short sighted, it is because I stand on the shoulders of midgets
I tried showing them to my pet bull and he immediately became bad-tempered and generally unpleasant to be around of. He's much fonder of the Neptune shots from Voyager really...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Reminds me of the Gameboy Camera Color Project: http://www.ruleofthirds.com/gameboy/
Will Slashdot cover oxygen discovered on extra-solar planet Osiris next week? Stay tuned!
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Art Buchwald has the whole scoop here.
I'm not certain, but this looks to me like it would have been in the path of where they drove the rover to the bedrock...might we have our first case of Martian Roadkill?
AHA!! That's why it had that problem. It stopped and was waiting for the traffic light to turn green.
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Roses are #FF0000, Violets are #0000FF, find / -name '*base*' |xargs chown -R us && mv zig greatjustice
Well, since they're only using one camera, and switching the filters, that means we can never know the true color of Martians.
Yeah, but how does this compare to the penguin worship formations we already know are there? That "crab" looks more like a "martian booger" to me.
Oh, come on. We're not interested in facts here. It's much more interesting to claim that a bunch of rocket scientists don't know what they're doing and that "we" are smarter than they are! Didn't you get the memo?