TOP STUFF Indian, these are two simply perfect pans, absolutely mind-blowing..

I merged them into an anaglyph here at home and it's just...perfect.

Nico

edit; oh here's your anaglyph and more already! Incredible..

Fredk is right : onto the Cape Verde thread from here guys..

Indian, I was doing my Sol958 stitch then I discovered your incredible pano, no need to post other!
I'm amazed by the pseudo-polar, is very similar to what I obtain with PovRay but I suspect you're using your personal projection SW...

I've put my reply on how that was made in a new thread

James

"herpetomorphic pseudoquadripedal feature " aka L!z@rd.

We love it, nprev! You're some words-fellah indeed. Let's hope we get a chnace to see it up close. I think it IS real, it IS green and it IS very interesting.

Kenny

...I aim to please! Shows at 5, 7, and 10, two drink minimum...

Hmm. Not to belabor discussion of the HPF, but are there any true indications of a compositional difference between it and its "host" rock at this point? I completely admit my ignorance of the capabilities of deriving that from optical imagery alone, much less those of the MER camera systems and/or post-processing.

CosmicRocker, the thought of finding exotic native minerals or raw elements on Mars fascinates me as well, esp. hydrated silicates. Imagine Oppy finding a big, fat tourmaline log poking out of the side of Victoria, or a massive gold nugget...too cool!

Pancam site now has color versions of Cape Verde and Cape Frio posted
http://marswatch.astro.cornell.edu/pancam_...alse_color.html

Thanks, Alan!

Hmm. Well, I hate to say it, but it looks like the HPF might just be a veneer of dark dust on that rock that's been flowing down on its host rock from that dark dune just up the chute. Oh, well...still neat!

Thanks Alan. Now I can make this "definitive" Capo Verde stitch starting from uncompressed pictures!
Click to view attachment
with the bightened HPF
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(enlarging this last sharpened picture, however, I suspect there is some dithering in the original TIFF pictures...).
Anyway, I do not if someone already highlighted this (or could be obvius to others) but only now I realized that the stratified layer at the base of Capo Verde could be the same omnipresent white horizontal layer we see in the distance over the far rim!

Ah, now thanks to alan and dilo et al the Lizard isn't green any more, but it still has a heckuva scaley back... the shadow cast by the sub-herpeto block on the scree slope below clearly shows the extent of dislocation of the block from the rock face behind. It is really sticking out towards the camera

Kenny

That's simply stunning Marco... I just know I'm going to sit staring at that for HOURS...

The subframe full filter set of Cabo Frio is down (well 12 filters of it at least)
Click to view attachment

I know this is probabley a dumb question but, is todays pan cam set of Cabo Frio less compressed than earlier pan cam's of it? I seem to see more detail in the layering.

I don't know the answer to that question, but the very first thing I thought when I saw the raw images up at the exploratorium was that I could see more details in the layers.

I don't know if it is less compressed, or some higher resolution mode, either way.... they sure seem to have finer detail visible.

And looking at the Oct 7 Nav Cams it looks like the rover might have moved a couple meters since the last upload on Oct 5.

Finally some colour filters to make nice pix...!

Click to view attachment

And hey, Hoagland... you want "Faces on Mars"? This place should keep you busy in blog posts for years. Maybe it's some kind of martian "Mt Rushmore", eh?

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Just guessing here: the images are subframe and the sky is outside the frame, that probably had some effect on the degree of stretching they got before they went up, or images taken through the middle filters L4,L5,L6 may have slightly better resolution than the L2 or L7.

Either that or a crowd of Rock People gathered together to gawk at the Alien Earth Creature.

"...Move along, Folks, it's nothing but a government experimental vehicle..."

I see Elvis!!!!

L7 typically has the best spacial resolution.

Doug

Now I am really confused. I always thought the short wavelength filters seemed to have the best resolution, but when I said so sometime last year, some of the optics experts came out of the woodwork and chewed my butt off. Can we really notice more precise angular separation between the long and short filters? I seem to remember something about the cameras "not being diffraction limited at these wavelengths."

You are correct. With diffraction limited optics the resolution is wavelength dependent. But the Rover optics are not "perfect" so the theory doesn't apply. I don't understand why, but the L2 (infrared) images appear grainy and noisy while the L7 (violet) images appear sharper.

--Bill

The iron-rich dust has a distinctive red hue and is imaged directly through L2,3..so images through those filters should be 'clearer' at times when there is less dust in the atmosphere and 'grainier' when there is a lot of dust around, scattering red light. Also important is the size of the dust particles vs the wavelength used to image them..

They used L7 for this reason to image the Gusev walls around sol 85.

I hope I'm putting this into words correctly

Nico

Nico,

I think you're right in broad terms but I don't think that any of that can account for the "fuzziness" of most of the images that we see - we see "fuzzy" images of items that are close up as well as far away with the amount of dust in the atmosphere has rarely been high enough to cause any visible effect near (ie within say 50m of the rover). We're talking about Tau value's that degrade light intensities by 25-50% over an atmospheric column of ~100km - so over 50m we're looking at "losses" that are right at the limit of the Pancam\NavCam's sensitivity (1 part in a couple of thousand which needs 11bit resolution or better). We certainly see distance effects from Tau and may well be able to see increasing dust levets affecting the view of the far rim during the summer but that dust haze effect is clearly not the same thing.
The wavelength\diffraction limit cannot affect cameras like these in this way - we're looking at macroscale effects not microscopic ones.

The only explanation that makes sense to me is that all of the relevant images are using some form of lossy compression. Possibly someone can find L2\L3 etc +LOCO on the planning data or the analyst notebook that puts the lie to that but I haven't seen anyone point out a set of images with an L2 LOCO and an L7 LOCO of the same spot to show that there is clearly something else going on.

Don't forget that the Pancams use lenses (as opposed to mirrors), so they most likely suffer from some degree of chromatic aberration, especially considering the wide range of wavelengths they are used for.

Here's my stab at putting this optics discussion "into focus".

Helvick is right that scattering from the atmosphere is completely negligible over short distances, where we clearly see that L7 is much sharper than L2 etc.

The IR L2 etc frames are less sharp because the optics are diffraction limited at those long wavelengths. As Bill wrote, the resolution is wavelength dependent in this case, and in fact gets worse with increasing wavelength (essentially the unlocalizable wave character of light is more noticable as the wavelength increases, and the particle/ray character as it decreases).

The optics may not be "perfect", or diffraction limited, at short wavelengths (L6,7), so L7 may not be sharper than L6, but they're pretty darned close, and the point here is that they're both much sharper than L2 etc.

Chromatic aberation may be a factor too, but pancam is pretty slow, f/20, so it's probably not dominant.

As far as "graininess", I haven't noticed any consistent difference between filters.

CosmicRocker, who chewed your backside off? Are you OK now? Can you recall where that was?

Hmmh - it seems my gut feeling about whether the Pancam's could be diffraction limited was just a wee bit incorrect.
Pancam PDS label document

So it appears to me that the combination of f/stop (20 !), wavelength and CCD sensor pixel size (12 microns) means that the Pancam's operate at their diffraction limits.


I don't know what each of those means but using the same data to calculate the Airy spot size I find that the L2/L3 filter wavelengths diffraction limited airy spot size covers a block of close to 4x4 pixels while at L6 it's <2x2 which kind of ties in with the above quote.

Aside from difraction, lens focal point can vary by wavelength. Back in the days of manual focusing, good camera lenses had a different focal mark on the lens focusing ring for visible light and for infrared (I used to do some infrared photography many years ago). It's also the reason why, if you look at something bright red on a bright blue background, the red seems to "pop". That's your eyes having to refocus between red and blue, even if the image is flat like paper or a computer screen.

Thanks for the link, Helvick. Yeah, I forgot to say that it's the small aperture that is really the source of the diffraction-limited behaviour. It's harder to focus a longer-wavelength wave through a smaller aperture.

Well, it really wasn't a painful chewing. I was just kidding about that. But iirc, I was promptly corrected by a few folks. I'll try to find that discussion, because I recall that the concensus of the experts at the time seemed to be somewhat different from what is now being said.

Thanks to the Google site search function finding the converstion was easy. If I am understanding what Emily quoted from Jim Bell, the L1 (unfiltered) images have the highest resolution.

Diane, that effect is the chromatic aberation others have mentioned. For pancams it is negligible because they are stopped down so much, to f/20.

CR, I've seen that mentioned as well, that L1 is sharpest, but I'm sceptical, since L1 response peaks near L2, where diffraction is clearly an issue.

I've always understood "chromatic aberation" to refer to the fact that color focus is not consistent across the entire focal plane. What is sharp in the center is not sharp towards the edges, a that loss of sharpness varies by color. A lot of this is also due to the fact that it's hard to design a lens in which the focal plane is truly flat for all colors.

What I referred to is that the focal plane for different colors isn't even a single plane.

If I'm wrong, please tell me where....

Nothing works like guessing wrong, as I did several posts ago, to get lots of responses to a question.

Diane, chromatic aberration actually refers to both. It can be longitudinal, which is the different focal lengths (or planes) for different wavelengths effect you mentioned before. Transverse c. a. gives essentially different magnifications for different colours, so it's an off axis effect.

Sorry to drag out this very non-Duck-Bay discussion!

Well, we got here because some of the pancam shots were a bit fuzzy, so it's not quite time to pull out the yellow flag.... yet. I do wonder whether the focus is set before or after the filter is in place. If the same focus setting is used for a number of filters, that could be the source of the fuzzies.

Anyway, thanks for the enlightenment on chromatic aberation!

Let me end the off topic discussion with a request to Doug, to ask Jim about this if he does another interview. We can always start a new topic in the Tech and Imagery section if anyone wants to.

Inspired by the weekend's images of clouds over VC, here's a bit of a martian Ansell Adams moment for ya...

Click to view attachment

The focus was set on earth.

Cool.

There's just too much going on! I must have missed these cloud images. Could somebody (re)post a link?

On reflection, the astronaut actually spoils it...

Click to view attachment

( ngunn: the images I referred to weren't specifically of clouds, they were just visible on Hazcam pics, so you didn't really miss anything, as such. )

Thanks, Stu. I have noticed that there is quite a lot of Pancam sky imaging going on in the instrument schedule but I don't remember seeing any pics - thought you might have found them somewhere. I guess they're not a high priority for relaying to Earth right now.

The first little bit of the Duck Bay pan is down.

Click to view attachment

James

Would love to see a sunset from where we are now...

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(be gentle with me, this is my very first play-about with Photoshop Elements... will get better, I promise! )

Stu,

Would you believe it's my first stitch !!!!
So, be gentle with me too.
I love when Oppy behaves like a buggy :
Click to view attachment

BTW : good try Stu, lack of light but vey evocative

The sun was shining on the sea,
Shining with all his might:
He did his very best to make
The billows smooth and bright—
And this was odd, because it was
The middle of the night.

Don't give up your Poet Laureate job, Stuey.

Okay, I won't... but going to keep trying anyway...

I have been trying to post this in the "Clouds" thread for the last half hour but nope, it just won't frakking let me.... anyway, this is what a silent night at Victoria might look like...


Click to view attachment

(although some Mars experts suggest that the planet's night sky might be tinged red due to the optical refraction qualities of the dust in the air...)

Did we have the same idea at the same time Stu,
Yours is much better than mine. But, why did you put the Polar in the South direction?

... cos it's now 11.15pm, I've been up since 5am, and with eyes full of grit and a brain full of mush I just wanted to get an image on here

Doing it properly - as I will - will mean both finding the right direction, and also tilting the constellations to accurately represent the view from Mars with its different axial tilt to Earth...

Last try before bed, this time with a bit of red added to the sky to take account of all that dust...

Phobos and Deimos rising over Victoria Crater...

Click to view attachment

dedicating this image to dilo, the "Colour Master"!

NOW you are cookin', Son!
All we lack is our own beautiful blue planet and the silhouette of Oppy on the cape at right.

But after that we want our haiku!

Edit: What about a desktop size?

Lots of new pan cams!!!

http://nasa.exploratorium.edu/mars/opportu...cam/2006-10-11/

The Duck Bay pan so far...



James