I have long looked at this image of Mars and wondered what it might look like. Here is my new version of it. I am working on another image from the 1990 oppositoin.
It is at somewhat larger size than the original pixels (150%).

The HST image was made from Raw data. But here is a 1988 Pic Du Midi image. On the right is the version that is spread across the internet. On the right is my attempt to deconvolve and rebalance it.

Gee, I always liked Percival Lowell's view:

Click to view attachment

Dig those canals. And this final view:

Click to view attachment

Tedstryk, what software/method are you using for the deconvoltion?

(Also, you seem to have two right hands based on your post above )

Oops...They will go well with my two left feet. I used a program called Focus Magic to correct focus. It did more for the HST images, since they truly had a focus problem. I also reduced the contrast of surface features in the Pic du Midi image to make it not so cartoonish.

Here is a combined view of the two best views from 1990. There is one partial-disk view from this set that I am still working on - it is the first HST Mars set, but it missed, causing part of the planet to be out-of-field.

Here are all three.

For some context, here is a beautiful and very recent (Oct 05) Mars at Opposition HST assemblage from 1995 to 2005, all after repair.

Oppy was just inside the border of the dust storm visible in the center of the 2005 image



Link to Hubble site press release

http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/newsdesk/...2005/34/image/e

Green planet redux:



cf.:

From: rgregorycl...@yahoo.com (Robert Clark)
Subject: Mars, the "Greenish" Planet?
Newsgroups: sci.astro, alt.sci.planetary, sci.space.history, sci.astro.amateur, rec.arts.sf.science
Date: 11 Dec 2002 18:31:55 -0800
http://groups.google.com/group/sci.astro.a...bc95cc1151a8911



Bob Clark

This is why it's important to try to get the color balance right on such images. The Mars express Gusev image was initially released with garish green dark areas, and various fools paraded that as proof of green regions on Mars NASA was trying to hide. I had an inadvertent hand in this nonsense when Richard Hoagland stole one of my images to make one of his asinine points. A summary of this saga can be found at:
http://www.badastronomy.com/bad/misc/hoagl...green_mars.html

Don

He stole one of Phils image recently and put 'courtesy of...' . Cheeky sod.

Doug

That's the first time I've read of him stealing images.
Is he known for that?

I can't believe how sad he really is.
Just awful.

Don:

Aaaargh! You used the 'H' word! Google will lead them here!

(breaks out emergency garlic and wooden stakes)

Bob Shaw

When H bomb dies, nobody will remember him. Even if one of his theories turns out to be true, his other endlessly silly theories will show he was just lucky. Goodbye, H bomb.

[quote=Decepticon,Dec 19 2005, 02:06 PM]
That's the first time I've read of him stealing images.
Is he known for that?

Yes. He does not respect copyrights, three artists I hnow of have had images used on his site and he refuses to remove them. Attempts to reach his ISP have proven fruitless, I wish there was some readily available means to attend to this.

Don

I can't believe all those hours he wasted at the Clark telescope. One is struck by the ugliness of Lowell's maps, an aesthetic deficit in no way compensated by scientific accuracy. Lowell's draughtsmanship is atrocious and the acuity of his observations no better than those of his contemporaries and precursors, not to mention all the things he saw that weren't there.

David:

No, he was a fine, fine observer, who always reported just what he saw.

It's just the deconvolving program he used went a bit overboard and had to be shot with a .JPG Compressor before it would lie down. Helluva mess, there was data leaking out all over the place, but that's what you get with lossy algorithms...

...honest!

Bob Shaw

[quote=David,Dec 19 2005, 08:30 PM]
I can't believe all those hours he wasted at the Clark telescope. One is struck by the ugliness of Lowell's maps, an aesthetic deficit in no way compensated by scientific accuracy. Lowell's draughtsmanship is atrocious and the acuity of his observations no better than those of his contemporaries and precursors, not to mention all the things he saw that weren't there.

While his maps do show extreme tendecies toward resolving every ambiguity as a liniar feature, his placements of the major dark areas aren't that bad. If one who is nearsighted (as I am) looks at a defocused version of his and other disk drawings showing canals, so that the lines are just no longer easily seen, one can almost imagine something of the original view.

Here are two things that I have been working on. The first is a UV (2 image composite) image of Mars from 2003 from STIS on Hubble.



The second is my attempt to clean up Robert Leighton's 1956 image of Mars from Mt. Wilson Observatory in 1956. This is, to my knowledge, the best pre-space age groundbased color image of Mars.

tedstryk: "The second is my attempt to clean up Robert Leighton's 1956 image of Mars from Mt. Wilson Observatory in 1956. "

I utterly agree that that's the best pre-space-age color image of Mars. Did you scan that from Slipher's book "Mars, The photographic Story" or what? My copy is one of the special copies with an actual glued-in photographic print of one of the plates in an attempt to convince readers it was capturing fine linear details that proved canals existed. (It didn't convince me...)

Yes, it is. Fortunately, it is so rediculously blown up that the printing cost the image little when reduced down to a sane size.

Dr Robert Leighton really did some pioneering work when talking of making color images of the planets.
http://www.nap.edu/readingroom/books/biomems/rleighton.html