I've noticed something, in fact two things, in today's images. They're so faint that they may not be real at all but they're in both the L and R views. Looking back I now think I can see them in yesterday's images too. They are a couple of bumps on the horizon about 2 degrees and 3.5 degrees to the left of the dark horizon feature here:
http://qt.exploratorium.edu/mars/opportuni...FNP2392L6M1.JPG

I'll try to post annotated images but with my primitive IT skills that won't be quick.

Edit: The left of the two is directly above a nearer dark dune.

Attached (hopefully)

And from yesterday:

Possible ID?

Oops arrows missing, trying again.

I don't have a change to check the ID but a couple of weeks ago I was actually looking for features in the pancams to match the ID you point to, thinking that there was a chance they might visible. I couldn't spot anything then, but hopefully the clearing atmosphere has changed that.

The feature is actually part of the rim of the gigantic Miyamoto Crater, whose name will be familiar to may here as one of the rejected MSL landing sites. Although that particular feature is actually much closer (just outside the landing ellipse in fact) of another rejected MSL site 'South Meridiani'

Cue a much nicer context image (though I notice the colouring is a bit mis-registered with the topography):
http://mars8.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/news/images/...to_ellipse2.jpg

BTW you don't say if you see real features where my arrows point in the pancams. I'm still waiting for confirmation that they're really hills and not something I should see a doctor about.

I agree there are two very faint features on the horizon to the left of the most prominent dark feature. They are visible in both 2181 and 2183 images. I don't have the software to view your identification files, but my guess is that these features might be the "south hill" features we've been looking for for some time, at about the same distance as Bopolu. Nice catch!

I'm not worrying about the distant-distant features for right now. We'll be at Twin Craters in a week or so, a bit closer to where the slope breaks and with one less intervening feature. Meanwhile, I'm going to be looking at the sand and rock under our wheels and on the lookout for changes afoot.

--Bill

Its only a word document with arrows on it.

Anyhow at first I thought it could be those outlying hills at Bopolu distance, but I thought these blips were too close together and a bit too far to the right for that, so I plumped for a couple of higher peaks farther away on the Miyamoto rim. Highly speculative at this stage but I'm sure James will nail it for us (and maybe the nearer features at the same time).

OK, I got to fiddling around with those Pancams from today-- 1P321987621EFFACFNP2392R1M1 and the next one. Cropped, stretched, pasted and enhanced, the panorama ain't pretty, but it does show what ngunn and Fred note. The nearby dark horizon feature, Twin Craters, on a slight rise on the left which drops off to the right, showing a more distant horizon behind the rise. On this horizon is another crater on the right, with a pair of faint hills to the left of it.

Rather like Russian nested-dolls, no?

--Bill

Very nice Bill! That shows the situation really well.

I think I've found a terrestrial analog :
http://www.nat-park.com/mule-ears-big-bend-national-park/

I know the Big Bend region well-- I used to take a holiday in the FtDavis/Marfa/Alpine area many years ago. 10,000 foot altitude, all volcanic rhyolite (sorta a continental basalt).

A personal terrestrial analog during that trip just occurred to me. The drive across Texas is long and for the most part traverses flat, flat terrain. Many miles from the mountains of west Texas-Big Bend you begin seeing the peaks just start to poke up over the horizon and grow over the better part a day, much like the distant craters are doing at Meridiani.

It's been 20 years, but let me see if I can locate old photgraphs and see how far away we spotted the mountains. I'm thinking 20-30 miles, but you know how fish stories are...

--Bill

I think I can believe that. The day I saw the images of the Bopolu peaks, I was driving at just around sunset to my local supermarket. From the crest of a hill (in Airdrie, North Lanarkshire, Scotland) I saw mountains on the western horizon, back-lit by the sky, which turned out to be Goat Fell and its chums on Arran. Google Earth says "80km" - fifty miles - line of sight to those 2000 foot hills.

Andy

50 miles certainly isn't outrageous when visibility is good and the target is high. I lived on the south coast of Ireland in West Waterford and could easily see 100-200m headlands to the east about 30 miles away from about 10 meters above sealevel when visibility was reasonably OK. Hook head lighthouse was somewhere between 50-60 miles to the east and it's top (at about 25m at a guess) was below the horizon or close enough that I could never make it out, even with a telescope on a perfectly clear day. It was almost always obvious on clear nights though, strobing just over the horizon.

I also recall a holiday in Switzerland in the 80's when the Alps were an obvious hulking presence to the south when viewed from the foothills of the Jura mountains about 40-50miles to the North. No peaking up over the horizon there - as I recall I had to look up at the peaks even at that distance but memory may be confusing me.

At risk of stretching this thread title completely off the planet Mars, I can't help chiming in. I've seen the Olympic mountains in Washington state from Vancouver on a very clear day, at about 140 km (85 miles) distance. And Mt Rainier, Washington is sometimes visible from Victoria, BC at a whopping 210 km (130 miles). I'm sure people can top these sightings, though - Hawaii or similar islands from the sea? The Andes or other coastal ranges from the ocean?

From my backyard I can see the Andromeda Galaxy... 2 million light years away...

I win

I can confirm what fredk says about seeing Washington from Vancouver. Mt. Baker is the most visible one (should be quite a show when it blows!), but with a little height the others beyond are visible too.
And yes, one can see clear across the Strait of Georgia to Vancouver Island, on a clear day.

But we should really be getting back to Mars now.....

This isn't too bad a digression-- we're relating the Distant Vistas we see on Mars to something we can relate to.

I found some notes on Texas road map which suggest that I started seeing the mountains in the Ft Davis (Ft Stockton, actually) area somwhere to the west of Midland, Texas, which would make the distance 85-90 miles.

Back to Mars: although the air is thin, the dust is very very fine and can be easily held in suspension. The dustiest part of an atmosphere is that part close to the ground. The line of sight to Endeavour and Bopolu is close to the ground for a few kilometers until the elevation starts to drop off. It is amazing how far we can see here.

--Bill

Back on Mars, I made a start at matching the features ngunn spotted. On sol 2181 the drive direction mosaic includes both the new feature and Boplou so aligning it with my reprojected HRSC images is fairly easy. I didn't get a chance to finish making a graphic but I got far enough to think the ID is indeed the high part of the Miyamoto rim that ngunn pointed to.

Here is a (1/4 res.) crop from http://hirise.lpl.arizona.edu/ESP_012820_1780

(1,6Mb) http://www.greuti.ch/oppy/ESP_012820_1780_...twin_others.jpg

From the City of Dijon in Burgundy, by a very clear day, you can see Mont-Blanc peak : that's a similar distance (220km).
"Avenue du Mont-Blanc"is named in Dijon after it...

"Mt Rainier, Washington is sometimes visible from Victoria, BC at a whopping 210 km (130 miles)."

Yes, I've seen that myself, on an unusually clear day! But the rainier the day, the less you can see.

Phil

Ironically I'd just about persuaded myself Fred must be right. I think I'll just wait till a consensus is reached.

One thing I have done is make a few measurements which convince me that we are gradually opening up the angle between the 'Mule Ears' and the thing to the right (which needs a name so I'm going to call it 'Rockaway' unless someone has a better suggestion). Whatever they turn out to be they provide a convenient 'fixed point' for comparisons (animations?) of the changing scene as we move south. A rough distance for 'Rockaway' should already be derivable.

Another suggestion, since I don't know how to do it myself, is that since our view of the 'Mule Ears' is more or less unchanging it should be possible to get a clearer picture of them by stacking all the images we get while we're on this heading.

Opening up nicely on the horizon now...

Click to view attachment

I'm a bit embarrassed I made a mistake on the shifting of the L/R Pancam views in my post above, i.e. the azimuth of the pancam mast (180°/193,4) as displayed in the Tracking Web Interface have to shift in the opposite way around for the used L6 filter images - means they have to be 181° and 194,4° ...sorry folks!

Click to view attachment Click to view attachment

It's only essential for the feature that "indicates" the twin craters, i.e. my assumption was wrong it is likely the center of the two.

It does, however, make all the difference for the identification of the 'Mule Ears', so thanks for the update Tman. I'm now back where I started on that, along with James. Eagerly awaiting his graphic.

Ok, upright "mule ears" look definitely better

Southward view on sol 2184 (R1/2x^):
Click to view attachment

Yeah, they're about 194 and 195 there, which I think fits the Miyamoto rim peaks.

Agreed. It's a flop-eared mule.

To be honest, I couldn't be more lost if I was dumped blindfolded into a blackboard factory with all the lights turned off...

fun -true color ( for the day)
Click to view attachment

Here's a crude Canvin-style inverse polar, showing just the twin craters, for sol 2184. (Area is so small that no special projection is needed here.) Pancam azimuths from Tman. The twins are subtending a pretty large angle already, around 7.5 degrees, although we're not seeing much yet. Presumably the rims are not raised. The one bump we can see seems to line up most closely with the central ridge, although I thought the dune on the far right side of the twins looked like the highest point. All will be revealed soon enough...
Click to view attachment

"It's a flop-eared mule."


Mule? It's my pointy-haired boss appearing over the horizon to find out why I've accomplished nothing all week.

Phil

Accomplished nothing all week? CBC, Slashdot, Fark, The Register and a bunch more beg to differ. Richard Garriott owes you for finding his rover - ask him to tell your boss to give you a break,

In principle that would work. The problem is that the Ears are so faint and indistinct that you'd have a hard time aligning them precisely. The result would probably be pretty blurred. Maybe we could try after the raws are publicly available.

In today's Expl. update there're R2 filtered images of the drive direction. The twin craters location got quite a new look.

Click to view attachment

Additionally I plunged into full resolution and come up with a slightly shifted position for the craters. But as Fred said, all will be revealed soon enough.

OK I ended up shifting my identifications slightly from my last post on Bopolu (getting a better fit in the process I think) and then get a nice alignment with the highest peaks on the SE-Miyamoto rim according to GM.

Click to view attachment


James

Fantastic work James. In anticipation I did some very rough calculations on those peaks. I think the visible 'Mule Ears' represent the top 100m or so of those mountains at a distance of approximately 80 km. Below that I estimate there is about 900m out of sight beyond the curvature of Mars. We only just see them, both geometrically and atmospherically. Nice.

Lots of new images today... has Oppy been having a clear-out? Cobbled together this - I'm sure others will do better, I just liked the (vague) details visible on the hills...

Click to view attachment

Most of them were old images, with the unusual suffix M7, identical to the corresponding M1's we've already got down. I don't know what that was about.

You mean we'd seen them before, or they were taken sols ago, cos that's what I was meaning.

Nice, James! A rather cool thing about this detection is that it bridges the very wide gap between what Oppy can see from the ground and what Hubble can see from Earth. Miyamoto is big enough that it's visible in Hubble images (or at least, associated albedo features can be seen). The red arrow on the attached 2001 HST image points to a pair of light and dark markings- the dark region is the southern floor of Miyamoto, the bright region below it is its southern rim. Thanks are due to Mike Howard- I used the Mars Globe iPhone app to make the connection.

[edit]- one more cool thing- Jim Bell was responsible for both images- he was PI on the Hubble program as well as being PanCam PI.

John

Click to view attachment

Cool John, the glimpse of the Miyamoto region from Oppy makes a very nice bridge to Hubble.

The sharpest (ever) image from Hubble was captured in 2003 when Mars came to his close encounter with Earth http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/r...003/22/image/d/ (...responsible J.Bell and M.Wolff)
You think Bopolu is even visible therein

For comparison an overview of the region from Mars Global Surveyor and a sharped Hubble piccrop:

Click to view attachment Click to view attachment

I was wondering if there are any orbiter close-ups (if that's not a contradiction) of those SE rim peaks? They'd make another interesting target for Nirgal's shape-from-shading technique.

Time to covering entirely the whole region with MRO! At the latest when Oppy rides the peaks of Endeavour

Folks:

Thanks for the heads-up on the possible visibility of Miyamoto! I hadn't noticed those, even though I have been trying to pay close attention to the horizon as we start rounding this "nose" in the topography.

-Tim.

Actually I think Endeavour may be visible in that Hubble photo. Amazing!

I really like this connecting the view from the ground to the view from Hubble. If I had time and the technical ability right now, I'd do a little movie, but instead here's a slideshow of zooming in on Meridiani from above. This is derived from Mars Globe, which uses a colorized version of the MOC atlas for albedo and a lighting map derived from the MOLA dataset.

The horizon view keeps getting better and better. I halfway expect to log on some day and see a view of the back of Oppy's head with Victoria in the foreground and Endeavour in the background...

--Bill

Knock on wood. We tried searching for VC on the latest north-looking pancams (Fredk?) and it was barely visible.

This Miyamoto from Hubble stuff is seriously cool. Has anyone noticed Gusev in Hubble images?

Here is a comparison image that I cobbled together from images I found posted here on USMF. The background and righthand image are from Tman in Post #242 in this thread. The Background is a MGS Context image, the Righthand is a Hubble image. For the life of me, I can't find the Post# where I snagged the Lefthand image-- it is an MRO/DEM-Altimetric image of an MSL landing ellipse at Miyamoto crater.

At any rate:

Background: MGS
Right: Hubble
Left: MRO

All at the same relative scale.

--Bill