Detailed Panorama of Mars Released

dptalia writes "NASA has just released a detailed panorama of Mars taken by the Spirit rover. During the short Martian winter the rover didn't get enough sunlight to move, so it took these pictures instead. Spirit took over 1400 pictures, for a total of 500 megs of data. If you look to the left of the picture, you'll see the tracks from the rover's trip."

Comments

'Detailed Panorama'?

[atomicstrawberry]

TFA has some tiny images that barely pass as thumbnails. You can get the actual 'detailed panoramas' from NASA directly.

Re:'Detailed Panorama'?

[Speare]

The problem is not "what color would enter my eyes?" but instead "what color would my brain register?"

The color calibration target that is on the corner of the rover (designed by a group including Bill Nye the Science Guy, if I recall) helps the scientists recreate the colors that entered the camera lens accurately, or to recreate the colors of the materials when ignoring the differences in Martian lighting conditions. But if you were standing there on Mars looking at all this stuff for a while, you'd probably have a different impression. Your eyes would "get used to" the color shifts and start remapping things to perceive them without the shift.

In cameras, this is called "white balance." The white target should look white, right? Well, anyone who has used their digital cameras to take pictures of a white birthday cake lit by candles, or a white wall in a room lit dimly with low-wattage incandescent bulbs has seen that white objects appear amber to the camera. Sometimes seriously orange. Forest shots look much more green/blue than you remember them. Many digicams have automatic white-balancing software, and they automatically shift the RGB colors until the average over the whole scene is neutral.

Your eyes would get a really reddish scene on Mars. Just like that automatic white-balance setting on your camera, your brain would get used to the reddish glow, until the white spot on the color target looked mostly white or subtly blushed instead of a ruddy red color.

I'll see your OMG...

[MelloDawg]

...and raise you a Really Frakkin' Big. (387MB TIFF >>>>>>>> 87MB JPG)

Also, this isn't the final image; just a preview in honor of Spirit's 1000th sol. Another panorama picture will be released that includes the rover deck.

Nothing new here

[OriginalArlen]

The McMurdo pan has been compiled over the last six months or so. The raw data is always up on the web almost as soon as it arrives on earth (thanks to the enlightened attitude of Steve Squyres, PI :) and lots of people grab these and make their own images. There's even a dedicated software app: google for "Midnight Mars Browser". There are a couple of forums dedicated to this stuff which I shall refrain from linking to (Google around, if you're interested enough you'll soon find 'em) that produce really superb (so-called) "amateur" work, often before the official JPL releases.