Now you can more easily correlate the features between the MRO picture and the VL1 landscape with a 360° pan I just mosaicked to show you the local horizon without any protruding S/C parts above it...
(Again lots of congratulations, Phil, for having discovered VL1's location long before it was spotted by MRO !)
Enjoy !

That is just the coolest darn thing. It's a brilliant idea. I could stare at that image all day. Thanks.

Vikingmars, that is indeed neat to the nth power! Just out of curiousity, did you colorize VL1 at all? It looks distinctly white with a tinge of blue in the pic.

To quote the great man...

WE'RE NOT WORTHY!!! WE'RE NOT WORTHY!!!!!

That's stunning!

Dear Nprev : no, the VL1 donut is just superimposed on the original "colour" MRO pic released by JPL.

...This year is having a promising start...

Yes I cant but concur, that was clever vikingmars - merci!

Click to view attachment ...and also a tribute to TIM PARKER !
Peering through my documentation, I just discovered that, in 1999, Tim pinpointed right the VL1 location just several meters from the one determined by Phil Stooke !
Here is his paper (as a "pdf" file)
Enjoy

Let's put all this in perspective. Tim found this location using Viking images, after two decades with a false identification about 6 km to the west. Those Viking images could not resolve the lander - in fact they were so noisy they barely revealed the nearby craters, and Tim's identification was a very nice bit of work. Then MSSS used a MOC image to identify a small feature nearby as the actual lander. I just said - "no, it's not, it has to be over here". But both of us, me and MSSS, were just building on Tim's initial identification.

Phil

I think a 3d-panorama would help a lot to identify ground features in the MRO image: does it exist?

Well... there is no topographic map currently available for the VL1 landing site that goes to the horizon. To help you find the features, here is the same "donut" pan, now with labels. Enjoy !

Wow! ...thanks!

VM, thanks again for this awesome work. I always wanted to know what was just beyond (and on) VL1's horizon...

Quick question, though. I remember that there was a nearly complete large crater (nicknamed 'Big Crater') visible on the horizon in some of the super-res images, complete with near & far rims. Is this in fact the crater located at about 5 o'clock from the lander?

[EDIT: 700 posts...wow. Please forgive the verbosity... ]

Dear Nprev, thanks.
"Big Crater" (referred also as "crater A" on papers by Morris & Jones, Tim Parker and Phil Stooke) is located at 8 o'clock. There are different namings that were used also for rocks. For example, boulder "e" was called "Volkswagen Rock" by some at the beginning of the mission and "Rhino Rock" by us at the very end (1981+)

Moved

Terrific, VM; thank YOU! Ted, that's some truly outstanding detective work (and image-smithing!) as well; I always thought that those were just another couple of hills.

Sure is amazing how different craters look from each other at ground level at different locales on Mars. In fact, a notional native Martian cartographer without access to space-based imagery might interpret Victoria & Crater A as distinct features without a common origin.

Maybe there's a lesson to be learned here...interesting.

I repeat: I think a 3d panorama will help a lot more identifying near and far objects.
I know it exists, I saw it once, but I can't find it anymore!

[I was having trouble loading the images in my post, so I am trying agin here]
I had never noticed how obvious that nearby crater is in the lander data. I charted it out here.



Here is the full pan I made (still needs work), before cropping it down to chart out features.



Also, here is a color super-res view of the more distant crater, visible to the right of the last pan.



Jumpjack, to answer your question, the problem is that this panorama is a fusion of data from both cameras to make up for the fact that much of this area is invisible to at least one of the cameras due to obstruction by part of the spacecraft. Also, Viking's cameras were quite far apart, making visually useful stereo pairs very difficult, even for areas with proper stereo coverage.