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Curiosity's Latest High-Res Photo Looks Like Earth
New submitter bbianca127 writes "Curiosity sent a picture down to us, and it looks a lot like Earth. Actually, the picture's color quality has been changed — to human eyes, the landscape would look a lot more reddish. Still, it looks remarkably like the southwestern United States (bringing to mind the Arrested Development quote about how Lucille Bluth would rather be dead in California than alive in Arizona)." Definitely a different sense of the place than the one given by the reddish-brown posters I remember from elementary school.
Especially the part that mentions where the photo is from.
"bringing to mind the Arrested Development quote about how Lucille Bluth would rather be dead in California than alive in Arizona"
no, actually, sorry, not at all
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
How much more do we need before the public accepts that it's just a few guys driving around Nevada?
Why is it that people keep redirecting me to a third party site to see the rover images, in stead of linking to the Nasa source?
That's because that photo is the white-balanced version! A white-balanced photo is what the scene in Mars would look like if you literally took the scene, cut out that whole area of ground, transported it to Earth and viewed it under the Earth's sky.
Big apple, new Yorik, undig it, something's unrotting in Edenmark.
While there may be a few color differences, one iron and silicate planet is likely to look much like another when there is no vegetation covering.
Official Heretic from the "Church of Global Warming". Proven right thanks to whistle blowers. AGW = Flat Earth Theory
They use black & white (greyscale) cameras because you can get higher resolution for the size & weight. They then take three photos with different filters to simulate color.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Here is a page on the MSL's site where you can see both versions of the photo:
http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/multimedia/images/?ImageID=4431
One is white-balanced and one colored. The white-balanced version represents what the scene would look like to human eyes under an Earth sky. The colored represents what the scene would look like to human eyes on Mars.
The point of using white-balanced photos is that geologists are used to looking at rocks on Earth. So when a geologist wants to judge rock characteristics using color, it helps to white-balance it so the color is similar to what it would be if looking at those rocks on Earth.
__
Big apple, new Yorik, undig it, something's unrotting in Edenmark.
Yyyyeah...they're not "altering" the photo. What they're doing is balancing the color so that people can know what they are seeing. The reason for this is that the Martian atmosphere has radically different color properties from that of our own. What this means is that visible observations cannot be made reliably: for example, a red rock on mars may not actually be red as we understand the color, and so conclusions geoloists make based on a color may be erroneous, because they are basing those conclusions on colors observed under earth's sky.
If anyone's interested, another scene is shown with and without white balance here: http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap120815.html
From the summary:
Definitely a different sense of the place than the one given by the reddish-brown posters I remember from elementary school.
That's because the picture has been altered to remove the red haze, in order to produce an image that more closely resembles a landscape on Earth.
From the article:
The colors in this image are not what a human standing on Mars would see — the presence of dust in the atmosphere would make the scene appear much redder. Instead, the pictures have been white-balanced to show how it would appear under typical Earth lighting conditions. This will help the Earth-centered geologists who are trained to recognize features based on how they look using more familiar light.
Earth is a big place. You can pretty much guarantee that any rocky planet will have parts that look like other rocky planets. When will we get any science? We KNOW the place is a reddish, dusty, rocky desert. Move on.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
So rocks on Mars, when coloured to look as they would if on Earth, look like rocks on Earth. Obviously this must mean that Martian rocks and Earth rocks share a common ancestor! Once again, Slashdot tackles the tough science questions that other media don't dare touch.
Spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, and stupid comments are intentional.
http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/multimedia/raw/?s=
Any proposals on what to do with images produced by instruments that sample outside of the human visual range? The guys down at legal said that I'm not allowed to use true-color displays for anything higher energy than longwave UV anymore... Not my fault what happened to those kids.
The photo gallery thingi on NASAs web site is painful to use and not suitable for displaying a large catalogue of images.
For an example of a mars image site that does not suck: http://hirise.lpl.arizona.edu/
Speaking as someone who moved to Arizona so I could study Mars... that photo does not have NEARLY enough things that will poke you, scratch you, sting you, bite you, poison you, or wait patiently for you to die so they can feast on your still-warm remains.
Despite having nearly no atmosphere, being blasted by radiation, and having an average temperature of about -70 C, Mars is WAY safer than Arizona. In fact, -70 C sounds positively wonderful this time of year.
From TFA ...
They have the images which aren't color corrected. But for certain kinds of science, it's easier to shift the colors to match what we expect to see on Earth so people can more readily know what they're looking at.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
I was there and agree, Nevada does look a lot like Earth...
(Honestly, I was to Nevada)
CAPTCHA = amalgams
From the article:
> The colors in this image are not what a human standing on Mars would see — the presence of dust in the atmosphere would make the scene appear much redder. Instead, the pictures have been white-balanced to show how it would appear under typical Earth lighting conditions.
So the story is that a photo of Mars that has been adjusted so it looks like Earth to make it easier for geologists to interpret... looks like Earth. Wow.
Have gnu, will travel.
You know, geology is a science too. And geologists like to look at rocks. Most of them spend a lot of time on Earth, so they get used to looking at rocks under the kind of lighting found here on Earth.
That's why the photo has been adjusted to account for differences in martian lighting -- So that scientists looking at it can pick out details that they recognize.
How about doing the reverse, i. e. adjust the white-balance of photos taken on earth to look like they were taken on mars? Can this be done accurately if we take the picture of Curiosity's sundial as a martian reference? I think it would be very interesting to see earthly scenes the way they would look on mars!
There is no sig.
NASA, please release REAL color pics for the general public. For the past 20 years, I've been having this "oh, that looks strange"; "well, that's not what it really looks like" back-and-forth every time photos are released.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
New Mexico, to be precise, near Albuquerque.
You mean like this? http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/multimedia/images/?ImageID=4431
I'm just waiting for a Nigel Sheldon showing up on Mars making fun of the rover :)
Her is the prologue those who haven't read the works of Peter F. Hamilton.
http://www.peterfhamilton.co.uk/index.php?page=Pandora_s_Star_Prologue
This is not like Hubble images where they're assigning colors to radio / infrared / ultraviolet / xray frequencies that your eyes can't even see. The difference between the two images in this case is similar to what you get every day by putting on or taking off sunglasses, or looking out your window at midday vs. near sunset. Colors are shifting all the time, for the most part you are insensitive to it. Most people taking pictures don't even bother to use a gray card to get correct(?) white balance.
There is a light brown colored drum shape at the far upper left of the image. It appears to be a damaged component of the rover... http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/676004main_pia16051-fullportal_full.jpg
Also the SSPTO is in the middle of the Europan north polar ocean under the sign saying "Beware of the kraken". Sorry...not very sorry
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Not to pick on you, but I'd say that you are perhaps working yourself into a tizzy over nothing. The difference between the photos of Mars from the 70's and what we are getting from the rovers now is hardly the result of NASA "lying...with photoshopped [sic] pictures." It's the result of better technology providing a more accurate representation of what we would actually see if we were there (or in the case of the white-balanced image in TFA, what we would see if that landscape were on earth, which can be useful for certain kinds of scientific investigation).
There is indeed a very, very fine line between simply processing a digital image and "Photoshopping" a digital image, but I would argue that these images are on the processing side of that line, rather than the "Photoshopped" side of the line. Consider this: my Canon Powershot -- admittedly, a much, much simpler device than Curiosity's cameras, I imagine -- doesn't produce RAW images; it processes every RAW image into a JPG. That introduces aberrations (JPG uses lossy compression after all, among other inaccuracies). Is that an "unscientific...photo alteration?"
Also, a lot of the photos we see from Spirit, Opportunity and now Curiosity are digitally stitched mosaics. For example, if you look at this photo, you can clearly see the boundaries of many of the individual photos. Are you going to get uptight because this wasn't a single photo, but rather was digitally "altered?"
If this kind of processing irks you, then I humbly suggest that you take your own digital camera and do some experimentation. Go indoors and shoot a handful of photos at different times of the day, with and without indoor lighting. Do the colors match what you see with your eyes? What if you display the images on a different monitor? If you have the ability to shoot photos in RAW and JPG formats, compare them both with what you see. Now play with some of the settings on your camera. My Powershot has settings for natural (sunlight) lighting, incandescent lighting, florescent lighting, tungsten lighting, etc. These software filters adjust the white balance to the kind of lights that are being used inside your house because the CCD in a camera doesn't react to all frequencies of light in the same way your eye does. In fact, most digital cameras include an IR-cut filter over the CCD because the CCD is much more sensitive to IR light than your eyes. Is that hardware filter "altering" the photo? Your eye won't detect those frequencies of light, but it's really there, and the filter is removing it from the photo.
MCSE? No, sir...I don't do Windows. Yes, I am an idealist. What's your point?
When the spectrum of ambient light does not match that of "white" light (which is simply the particular spectrum we evolved to perceive), the eye's photoreceptors become disproportionately fatigued, and perception of the light's color drifts toward white. You can experience this phenomenon yourself if you light a room entirely with red party lights. Soon, your red photoreceptors will become fatigued and the colors of objects in the room begin to appear more normal. I think explorers on Mars would experience the same effect. So photos like this are actually how it would look to them.
Ok can anyone answer what the black squares are? Are they blackouts to hide specific things or are they lost data? To me they just seem at really weird spots. The only one I could see being there is the one over the equipment itself. I try to look at a way they were just there based on the 8 pictures they used but I just cant see the pattern,
Thoughts or has anyone seen and info on what they are?
What about smell? Or hearing? Does curiosity have any of those? I'm really curiois to hear how it sounds on Mars.
Curiosity has a high resolution color camera on it.
1200x1200 hardly qualifies as hi-res, heck it's not even HD.
Set your phasers on "funky"!
...banth and ulsio tracks all over the place?
"Curiosity sent a picture down to us, and it looks a lot like Earth." "Curiosity sent a picture down to us, and it looks a lot like Arizona." "Curiosity sent a picture down to us, and it looks a lot like Utah."
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..Photoshopping something makes it look like something else!
You can't do "real" colour. If you set a TV camera for outdoor light and bring it inside, are the weird yellow colours somehow more real? Even though you never notice that everything is weirdly yellow when you are inside? What about if you do the opposite and see everything in blue?
To do it "right" you would need to recreate the whole environment with ambient light and all, to give your brain the chance to run its colour correction. Or just go there and see for yourself.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
You are incorrectly confusing the name of an obscure logical fallacy with a simple English phrase.
The name of the logical fallacy itself comes from an archaic use of "beg" meaning assume/demand, still seen in "begging your pardon", "the committee begs to report", "beg to differ". Specifically, to take for granted without justification. Moreso, whenever anyone uses it in the context of the logical fallacy, they almost always use it to name the fallacy. "That argument is 'Begging The Question'."
OTOH, "which begs the question" is a simple, vastly more common English phrase which means just what it says. It's not even a colloquialism, since it requires no prior knowledge to interpret. And it's impossible to misunderstand which sense the poster meant, without being wilfully obtuse.
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
That looks like my backyard.
The day Microsoft creates a product that doesn't suck, it will be known as the Microsoft Vaccuum Cleaner!