A L2 pancam/HiRISE comparison.



James

That explain why you didn't notice I was kidding

That's beautiful Stu, and another valuable addition to our collection of real Mars landscapes with real (or at least realistic) skies. As I commented in 'clouds' I hope this becomes a regular theme here.

Real nice Stu. I wonder now what it actually looks like at night there. There would never be much ambient light other than starlight and a tiny bit from Phobos as it screams across the sky twice a night. Also speaking of polars (slightly OT), the north pole is in Cygnus (53 deg. declination for Earthbound astronomers) and the south is in Vela close to Kappa Velorum. I am sure many here know this, however that and other kewl facts on Martian Astronomy can be found in a pretty decent Wikipedia page:
Astronomy on Mars. Here's my wish from the most masochistic image thaumaturge: Animate the night sky over Victoria with Stu's version of the crater in the foreground!

Beautiful night-time renderings, Stu, especially the one with Phobos and Deimos. And great poetry as well!

"Victoria by Earthlight"...

Click to view attachment

I know the Earth couldn't really cast enough light to illuminate the crater interior so dranatically but, well... sometimes you have to show what your heart would see, and not just your eyes, you know..?

Nice work Stu ...

Very nice, Stu!

Here is a wide perspective view south towards Cabo Frio, from SOl 959. The coverage of the sky is from the following sol (which is why it doesn't match up exactly).

Stu, one word for this one and the "double-moonrise" image:

gorgeous !

Anyone dare give a guess as to the angle of that slope going down Duck bay!!

That's real poetry Stu, thanks.
BTW, you know that, on Earth, there are 3 celestrials bodies that casts shadow : Sun, Moon and Venus. So, Earth + Moon may have some effects on the night scenary on Mars. Specialy when Phobos & Deimos pass overhead. I guess that Jupiter & Saturn would gain some magnitudes at their best when seen from Mars.
If you add it all, the best of the best, when all of these come together would worth a visit there


Too busy staring at Stu's nigth sky

Stu, yesterday I missed your simulated-night picture... to many active threads, recently!
I like them very much, light illuminating Victoria is beautiful and I can almost feel the cold, silent martian night... (thanks for dedication! ).

Stu, that "Phobos and Deimos Rising over Mars" absolutely takes the cake!

Now I'll be really impressed if someone other than Stu can look at this image and tell us what sol in the Mars year it was (hypothetically) taken and what the local time on Mars was.

Thanks to those (climber and Stu) who are now doing "Mars under the stars" simulations. You know that the Martian night time sky must be pretty spectacular. I suspect it may be even more spectacular than the simulations that have been made. Having been privileged with some pretty spectacular views from some almost pristine locations on earth, I've always wished I could see the night sky from such a truly pristine location on a planet with a thin atmosphere. More, please.

and WHERE on Mars we are

Full Duck Bay pan in L2




L2/R2 anaglyph - registered as I prefer it (looking through the screen). Use stereophotomaker if you want to adjust it.



James

Your wish is MER's command...

James,
Love the anaglyph but it looks awfully steep.

PS. Are you still in Sydney? nice hot start to spring and another one on the way tomorrow I believe.
Cheers Richard

Sorry, but that's the daytime sky and the sun, seen through the solar filter. (Check out the "L8" at the end of the filename - that means solar filter. Also, the picture was taken at just before 5pm local Mars time. The "stars" there are just noise (or cosmic ray hits). Just thought you would like to know, before anyone goes nuts with the image artistically...

Thanks mhoward...
Not reading the instructions...that's a problem I have
I confounded the Sun with Phobos...

Does that make you heliophobic?

Very easy to do. (Although without the solar filter, the scene would look quite different.)

Or Phobophiliac



Doug

Naaa...You guys know I'm more the altophobiac-abissophiliac kind...

Well, typical of this mission and of Mars, the angle of the slope is just in the interval between "easy deal to climb in and out" and "couldn't ever get out again". Just to make things interesting for the rover drivers...

I dunno but this thread seems to be going downhill pretty fast!
Phobophiliac! (Hey, that would be a good band name....)

Continuing the downhill slide...

Phobophiliac? Would that be an image of Phobos enhanced with Phil-o-vision?

Credits(??) for inspiration go to Stu, Shaka, and the fine people of the Pulteney Distillery Company... *)


.

Back to serious stuff...

I made some long baseline anaglyphs from the pancam imagery from the penultimate and ultimate stops at the Duck Bay rim. The images were taken sols 952 and 953, but the corresponding positions on the route map are labeled 951 and 952. These positions don't give much baseline for the far rim, but they do for Verde and Frio cliffs.

Still, the baseline isn't orthogonal to these cliffs, so I had to scale/rotate the frames to match them, but couldn't do it perfectly, so you may experience headaches from viewing these! Also the lighting angle seems to differ between the two frames.

Cape Verde in two parts:
Click to view attachment
Click to view attachment

And two views of Frio:
Click to view attachment
Click to view attachment

There really are incredible details visible in these four images that aren't in the pancam L/R anaglyphs we've seen already.

Great stuff, fredk, especially Cabo Verde. The amount of detail is fantastic; it's worth the headache.

Sol 957:


Sol 952-955:

Quick false-color stitch:

Nice work on the LBLs, fredk. No headaches on this end, only smiles. The 3D relief you teased from the images is quite excellent, to say the least.

mhoward: I just wanted to mention that I finally tried that Hugin program with the panorama project files created by your MidnightMarsBrowser program. It amazed me. It was so simple. I simply told MMB to create the files, and then I told Hugin to stitch them. I still need to learn to tweak some things to make panoramas as sweet as yours, but that can wait until tomorrow or the next day, or whenever. I think Autostitch is about to take a back seat on this desktop.

Oh, and thanks for updating the metadata before going to bed.

Lastly, can't we give Julius a good answer to his legitimate question? I don't remember with certainty, but I thought I remembered a reputable person making a measurement of the slope on Duck Bay as less than 20 degrees a while back.

The first UMSF "Victoria BarBQ" guest reaches Duck Bay...

Click to view attachment

See you all there!

(Can't guarantee Oppy's tracks still being there for photos tho, sorry...)

[quote name='mhoward' date='Oct 13 2006, 09:48 PM' post='72563']
Sol 957:




For a second, I thought this was a simulated shot of a Mars sample return mission launching.

I think this is tough to do with much accuracy now. James and I did measurements of some slopes on the far rim which we could do because we had horizontal and vertical views of the far rim. To do Duck Bay properly from here I think you'd need to construct a 3D model from stereo imagery.

Still, you can say a few things. Using my technique from a year ago during Spirit's descent of Haskin ridge, I measured the angle between the horizon and the edge of the hidden slope in front of us at the sol 952 location to be 20.3 degrees:
Click to view attachment
(Thanks to James for the pancam pan.) Assuming that the visible horizon coincides with the true horizon, this means that the slope of Duck Bay in front of the sol 952 location must be more than 20.3 degrees.

But if you look at the orbital image, you can see that the slope in front of Oppy looks like the steepest part of Duck Bay - it looks less steep to the north and south.

You might think you could just do this to measure the slope of the south part of Duck Bay:
Click to view attachment
But this only works if the lower line is parallel to the steepest direction down the slope, and the plane defined by the angle is normal to the line of sight. It's hard to say if that's the case, so don't take that 17.5 degree value too seriously.

Yup still in Sydney. Escaped to the Blue Mountains to avoid the heat at the weekend though.


Looks like the data flow has stopped for the conjuction now. So I'll post the partial colour Duck Bay pan that I wasn't going to bother with.



James

Thanks James. Is that in 'true colour' now?

No. Using the stretched jpegs with no calibration files, true colour is impossible. It is however a guess at a 'realistic' colour.

And i've just noticed that there is a Cabo Frio ture colour image on the pancam site which shows that I'm not that far off - still a bit to much contrast though.



James

Still a little missing data, but after the long conjunction I thought it about time to get something out. I'll produce a more refined version, better colour, sky added etc, for the final version.



James

a first draft version

i need to do some correction

Click to view attachment

Well there is still some missing data, but you can hardly tell in this version. So this is probably it for Duck Bay.



Enjoy,

James

Stunning job, James!

Good GRIEF....!!!!!!!!!! Where did I put that swear box?????

Stunning James, absolutely stunning.

Destined for the wall, that one, no doubt about it.

Great work James , your image is very good. Thank you.

I will make my own version but the stitching is a little hard (autostitch have difficult to join perfectly the differents pictures ... that's why I am stitching manually the panorma).

James, U da' MAN!

I no longer bother to create pancam panoramas because I know that yours will be so much better.

jamescanvin
Between Stu getting poetic, Ustrax waxing philosophic, and everyone else's great creative responses to the rovers in other threads, I was moved by your full res Duck Bay pano to record this:

Victoria.mp3

I had it on my second monitor with a slow pan and Logic Audio on the other

(Admins: if this is more appropriate in its own thread in the community chit chit section, please move it)

Great pan! I am amazed at how quickly and cleanly you assemble them!

Ooh, that's kinda spooky... like something from the excellent WAR OF THE WORLDS album! Goes very well with the Victoria pic too... is that something you wrote yourself?

( Or is it a piece of music I really should know, and just made a fool of myself by asking 'is that something you wrote yourself?'? )

Sitting here waiting (im)patiently for more Beacon images I'm thinking of that classic song "Someday My Prints Will Come..."

Sorry!