Experimenting here... Click on the image for the large version.

Looks like you (well, your MMB!) is blending together navcam and pancam images? Very impressive; I noticed you did something similar with false-colour rock close-ups set against B&W navcam images.

How are you doing this - it almost seems like you have access to the camera's pointing vectors - but those have not been released yet for these recent images, surely? I know from experience that panorama generation is not an easy thing to do.

I'm very impressed by these hybrid images!

Airbag

The TIFF format has been around for a long time, whereas PNG is a newcomer.. TIFF also allows you to specify just about everything anyone could ever possibly care about image-wise, whereas PNG deliberately concentrates on the 'basic' image data. Look at the specs for TIFF sometime, you'll see what I mean.

Airbag: It's a secret. Shhhh! (Scroll down to the bottom)

But in short, yes, it's a combination of images, and no, I don't have access to the pointing information, I have to deduce it as more-or-less documented in the super-secret link. More detail than that I'd probably reserve for the MMB-specific thread.

But does NASA actually use any of that extra stuff? All I can find extra in one image I downloaded from their catalog is the kind of compression used (LZW) and what I assume is the program used to compress the file - VICAR Program VTIFF.

I suppose extra info embedded in a file could be useful though.

From what I recall, TIFF was created long long ago, when there was wide disparity between how images were represented in various mainframes (and maybe even minicomputers!), and there simply was no unified graphics file format, so they threw everything they could think of into the spec so that nobody would be left out. It's a pretty crazy format - it seemed overly complex when I looked at it way back when, but maybe it would make more sense to me now. Regardless, it's been around so long that it's still 'the' image format to use when you want platform independence. GIF and PNG (and BMP) have always been rather PC-centric.