I'm a big fan of the THEMIS images too, there are some real gems there. I've lost count of the number of times I've stopped what I was supposed to be doing here on my PC and gone back to the recently-released image of Aram Chaos (one of my favourite places on Mars) to just roam around it.

Very good discussion here ... love those detail image crops !


Here is another of those "jagged-shadow"-shots (detail crop, tone map enhanced, added (false) colors and
virtual airplane shadow as a 50 meter scale ...

original image link:
PSP_001337_1675

Not EVERY week, but yes, I do click when I get Ron Baalke's email.

I just looked at the image OWW posted and the two 'zoom-ins' that followed. All I can say is WOW!

They are just incredible, you expect to see camels and I swear if something had walked there we'd be able to see the footprints...

Oh for a faster connection...

Thanks. That cumindex.tab file is very helpful for finding the cool places. The line describing the image I posted seems to be incorrect though. It says "Proctor Crater dunes", but actually it's the crater to the east of Proctor. Don't know its name.
Also, all CTX images are mirrored/flipped and brighter in the middle. What's up with that?


Interesting. Well, plenty of people on this forum, bring it on! Personally, I think credits for a cut/paste/stretch job is a bit over the top though, but that's just me.

Ehhh, I should point out that my CTX-cutout was 50% of full-resolution. N1ckdrake's 'zooms' are not from the same CTX image but from a HiRise image... for those that hadn't noticed this already.

That's the way they come out of the camera; it's an artifact of the relatively wide angle CTX telescope. There's data on the volumes with all the correction coefficients.

Here's a pretty CTX image I found just by looking at the PDS volumes. It's one of those cracks to the west of Elysium Mons. This is just a small subsection downsampled 2x. For the full impact of CTX, you really need to make mosaics.

Click to view attachment

Bjorn,
Any chance you could add support for these calibration files to IMG2PNG? I tried it on a data batch, and it looked to me like it wasn't flat-fielding or decompanding. I'll write my own app after the holidays if you don't have time.

Hi Stu, HiRISE now has around 1500 color images released, something like a third of a Terapixel in RGB color. I've only looked at a small fraction, but it is mind-blowing. I had my desktop display set to show a random chunk from a random each, updated every two minutes, but had to turn it off, because so frequently I was stopping to copy the image into a favorites folder and not getting any work done. :-)

We worked hard to get the color processing automated (better late than never!) and further improvements are in the works (stretches that saturate less pixels, better color band co-registration). There had been great interest in this data on this forum early on!

Aaaarrrgghhhhh! (...turns chartreuse with envy...)
How big a bribe would it take to get you to turn it back on and feed it through the web?
(I'd be happy to knit you a monitor cozy, so you wouldn't be distracted... )

Thanks for the feedback GuyMac I do realise how hard you've all worked, and appreciate all your efforts. To stress again, no criticism was intended. I'm off to my local library tomorrow - if this ***** cold lifts!!! aCHOO!!! - to sit at one of their broadband PCs for a couple of hours and do some exploring.

Not a lot of response to my CTX challenge yet. Maybe you guys are waiting to surprise me for Christmas.

Here's a nice CTX image of White Rock: P03_002033_1720_XI_08S334W_070101 downsampled by 4.
Click to view attachment

Mike, given the "ancient" hardware I find myself currently using, I would need a Christmas surprise of my own to do any imaging magic these days. (Though come Macworld in January, I may be able to step up to the plate....)

Not a CTX image Mike, sorry, but I did have a lot of fun in the library this morning, taking advantage of their broadband connection to have a leisurely stroll around the MRO galleries... made a few crops and colourisations...

Click to view attachment

Was looking forward to using the IAS viewer but it wouldn't connect... grrr... oh well, next time...

Nice "White rock" image. These layered mounds always look spectacular. Here's another one.

CTX image P03_002261_1744_XN_05S079W: Light-toned mound in east Tithonium Chasma

Good work, Stu !
I especially like the "mesa top" mountain at the bottom of the image.
do you have a link to the original PSP image ID ?

That's really a good point, and I hope we can find some way to facilitate it (by extended mission???). The tools aren't quite up to the vision. I want to be able to select a region within a JP2 viewer application, be able to link to that particular view and resolution, associate that link with tags aka keywords, with an online application to search through the tags, see the most popular, etc, etc. The fallback might be to save many images & upload each to a forum. ;-)

It's a neat image, but like most of the MRO data, to the layman at least it's just an incremental improvement over MOC stuff like
http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/E01_E0...2002/meridiani/
which I suspect is why it's hard to come up with an MRO image that really seems revolutionary.

Here's me thinking that 2 gigapixels in a single swath was a revolution in itself.

I"m having a play with CTX @ Gusev - there's quite a few overlapping images there.

Doug

I'd argue that a considerably smaller swath than HiRISE's at the same resolution would have produced much the same science. It's hard to quantify the benefits of a wider FOV, especially with the 6-meter context provided by CTX.

That said, to be fair CTX is for all intents and purposes mostly an incremental improvement on MOC. The images are 10x wider and of comparable resolution to most MOC images, the buffer is much larger, and the SNR is a few times better, so we cover a lot more ground at better quality on average than MOC did, but I don't think this difference is perceptible to most people.

I think the jury is still out on what the major scientific results of MRO will be.

Thanks Nirgal, really appreciate that, especially as you're one of the people who inspired me to have a go at making images like that.

The PSP ID is: PSP_002839_1825

Another area that caught my eye...

Click to view attachment

What can I say? I'm a mesa fan! Looks like Mars' very own "Monument Valley" down there... imagine the pics a rover would send back from here, as it rolled along with the theme from "The Big Country" playing in the background...

Rabe Crater CTX: P05_002890_1342_XI_45S326W

Click to view attachment

Wow n1ckdrake, that's a spectacular choice!

I could have sworn I saw some map projected CTX images on the PDS somewhere....or am I going nuts - I can't find them now.

Doug

MSL landing site candidates are map-projected. I can't think of any others.

http://marsoweb.nas.nasa.gov/landingsites/msl/ctx/

Slope streaks in Arabia Terra - CTX: P06_003285_1930

Click to view attachment

Wow. Cool image! I wonder what's going on with the very linear terminus to the flow in the upper left corner?

Even though I designed a large part of CTX, I haven't looked at 1% of the data from it. From these images, it's doing everything I hoped it would. Thanks for finding them!

Merry Christmas everybody!

...all I can think of is some sort of deep fracture, which drained them rather rapidly.

And actually, this begs a question: Why don't we see diffusion features at the end of these things, like deltas? Does the putative water evaporate and/or freeze so quickly that they never get to form? The abrupt terminations are odd in themselves...

I'd have characterized these as dry slope streaks, no water involved. But that terminus seems weird. Only thing I could think of is some topography below the limit of resolution (some kind of a ridge or dike maybe.)

I'm with Mike, here, Nick. These look a lot like dust slope streaks, not like the putative water-carved gullies seen elsewhere. You see these slope streaks all over on Mars, in places where liquid water could not possibly exist (i.e., high on the slopes of the Tharsis volcanoes) and they don't seem to share the V-cut morphologies of the gullies.

-the other Doug

Okay, I'm with you guys now; been thinking in terms of the wet model. This feature seems to provide considerable evidence for the dry model.

Thanks, n1ckdrake (and others), for sharing all those great detail view findings !!


Here's a hand colorized version of the Rabe Crater picture (unfortunately I have no time left for framing and caption this time ...)

Every time I see one of your images Nirgal I feel like Luke watching Yoda lift that X-Wing out of the swamp...

Humbled...

thanks Stu, I'm embarassed by your praise that is really too much for my humble effort
So I hope no real (Jedi) Master is reading this *lol*

unnecessary quoting removed

Wow Nirgal, that picture is amazing! The amount of detail you applied is mind-blowing! Thanks for posting this awe-inspiring picture.

Crater in Coloe Fossae Region - CTX: P03_002348_2172

Click to view attachment

n1ckdrake,
What are you using to calibrate and uncompress the raw pictures?

Hello hendric. I currently use ImageJ or NASAView to access the raw data. For calibrating images I use Photoshop CS2. And I find Irfanview to be extremely useful as well.

n1ckdrake, I think that if you

a. change the caption of your latest crater image,
b. reduce the resolution, and
c. post it in the Paolo's Plunge thread at the Opportunity forum

you would have half the forum scratching their heads trying to explain what they see in this "weird RAT hole"

Thanks for these gorgeous crater images you provide us.

How do you calibrate with Photoshop?

Another "Alien Landscapes" detail shot out of the virtual helicopter window while flying over HiRISE's endless
gigapixel landscapes :-)


Large image (1.2 MB)

(For a better sense of scale, I added an artificial airplane shadow as "50 m scale" in the lower right corner...)

Original context image:
PSP_002379_1755

It can be done. I often use Photoshop to subtract flat fields and dark frames when I have a problematic image (such as working with old Mariner images). It is a pain, but if some tweaking is needed, such as when one doesn't have an exact exposure match and is having to approximate, it is the best way to go.

Ted

Cereberus Fossae is rapidly becoming one of my "fave places" on Mars, and the recent release of hundreds of colour images from MRO included a couple of shots of this fascinating feature that I just couldn't resist playing about with... I think it's the combination of the steepness of the cliffs, the long shadows and the hints of detail on the floor that make it so intriguing... you can easily imagine standing on the edge of this great wound in Mars' crust and peering down into the dark depths below...

Click to view attachment

Click to view attachment

Those are brilliant. Thanks for posting them Stu.

Light-Toned Material in Western Louros Valles/Sinai Planum (TRA_000876_1715)

Click to view attachment

Colourised crop from "layering and slope streaks in Henry Crater" (PSP 006589_1915)

Click to view attachment

When we'll have stereo coverage of that area, high-res DEMs, etc., maybe one of the image wizards on this forum will be able to create just such a panorama.

Not strictly speaking a PDS issue, but I don't know where else to put this, so apologies in advance if anyone thinks this is too off topic.

On her always-fantastic blog today, Emily has a link to a rather good Arizona State University website which - cutting a long story short here - has gathered together all the images of Mars taken by various orbiters over the years, and allows you to browse them to your heart's content. I thought I'd have a look and, on my first random click, found this beauty from HiRISE...

Wow... I now have a new "favourite martian crater"!

Click to view attachment

Thanks Emily!

Actually, I take that back. CURSE you Emily!! Curse you for telling me about such an addictive, time-devouring site!!! This is a martian equivalent of GALAXY ZOO.

You open the page, select the image database of an orbiter, and are taken to a map, with lots of random red dots or boxes spattered all over it... Boots on, rucksack over the shoulder, time to explore... hmmm... I wonder what THAT box looks like magnified... (click)... oh well, nothing interesting there.... what about THAT one? (click)... nice, but not that great... THAT box? (click) WOW! Look at that! I've never seen that picture before, and I thought I'd seen EVERY picture of Mars!

Even found a new (to me) pic of "my" crater on Mars...

Click to view attachment

Go to this site at your peril...!!!

Muhahaha...my evil plan is working.

--Emily