Gotta remember that NASA's versions are the official ones, and given that fact that Martian spacecraft imagery has endured far more than its fair share of minsinterpretation & controversy over the years... ...it makes abundant sense for them to pursue a middle-of-the-road (if not outright conservative) approach to enhancement & colorization.

I'd add that I think the colours are fine in the official release. Colours are what they do best, and their goal with their "true colour" mosaics is to be technically close to "true colour".

In terms of stitching, I assume jpl does some auto projection based on pointing info and there are inevitible errors in that. Fixing them would presumably mean some "doctoring" as Stu said, and would require effort/time/money.

One of my complaints about this new official release, and about many of their releases, is the fuzzy horizon. What they appear to've done is to add a faked sky (with smooth gradient left to right), and blended it into the horizon, resulting in a blurred horizon. (Using, presumably, real colours sampled from the individual frames.) I can understand though that skies can be hard. They may be overexposed in some filters, and the brightness in various filters may change substantially during the day or from day to day in large pans. This would make it hard to get a consistent sky colour across the entire mosaic. Presumably they believe the aesthetic benefits of a uniform sky outweigh any concerns about "doctoring", since there's not much to see in the skies (and of course the original pancam frames are available anyway).

The blown out loss of detail in the bedrock is surprizing, since they have the full bit depth originals. Maybe it's just a lower (more true) contrast.

Showing the colour of Mars' sky has given NASA severe headaches before, as we all know, so they have to be very careful with that, but I'm with you Fred, I hate those blurry horizons. Odd that the whole point of this image - as its title announces - is to show the faraway hills, but you can't actually see the hills on it as anything more than vague smudgy blurs...

Enter CS5:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NH0aEp1oDOI

<gasp!>

A tool to remove lens flare?!?! What manner of evil, wicked sorcery is that?!?!?!?!

That was .... just amazing.
If there has ever been a clear case of witchcraft, indeed this is it.

I'm really looking forward to clearer (I know they'll only be slightly clearer!) views of the dark Iazu 'promontory' that is clearly visible in the recent Hills images...

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(cropped from Ant's image)

It almost looks like it's hovering in mid-air, doesn't it? When you look at it on a CTX image I think you can see why...

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It seems to me that it's a dark rock face at the top of a rather steep slope? And there's that interesting curved 'moat' around it at the bottom, too. Any geo experts here care to comment / speculate on what happened there?

Not saying it's particularly interesting or important, just that it caught my eye, that's all.

Crop from Sol2223 image.
EDIT - Pancam + a stretch.
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Stu - I'd agree with you there. As our view improves, we may get a look at the "moat"...

Astro - that's L1 pancam, not navcam...

Dust/haze tends to concentrate near the ground, so we'll be looking through a long path of that dust until we get to the "brow" of the hill and can look through Km of clear air at the hills. The view is slowly (inexorably?) getting better.

What you are seeing here is deposition and differential erosion. First came the surface that was formed from the warm, wet weathering of basalt creating soil and sediments containing clays ("phyllosilicates" is the classs of mineral). The Endeavour impact occurred, catastrophically rearranging the surface. More weathering of the weathered materials as the climate went cooler and drier. During this dry period the desert playa developed and the kieserite/evaporite/aeolian dunes environment of the Burns Formation was created. Then came the Iazu impact which created an erosion-resistant ejecta blanket over the erodable evaporite beds. This is called a "pedestal crater" and in the CTX image you can see light-toned evaporite beds overlain by the resistant ejecta rubble. And there has been uncounted cycles of weathering, erosion, deposition and climactic changes since Iazu event.

Our Intrepid Rover is at the top of this layer cake, making her way down through the many layers of the (geologic) section and thence over to the jumble of the Endeavour rim. And we'll eventually make sense of all this.


Now, the above isn't 101% accurate, it's more a WAG (Wild Arse Guess) based on a few MOC/MRO images and is a very generic explanation. We don't have great orbital coverage of the area, but as Oppy movers closer, I'm sure that will be moved up on the priority list.

--Bill

Thanks for that Bill. It's nice to have a framework to think in even though there's plenty more still to be learned. Looking at the end of Stu's promontory suggested to me steepening by undercutting, and this possibility seems not inconsistent with your scenario. On the CTX it almost looks as if the line of the 'moat' could mark the original margin of the apron and the promontory has been eroded back from there to its present abrupt 'cliff'.

Really appreciate that explanation Bill, thanks.

Here is the Sol 2223 pan, the L1 one. It's a very looooooooong pan, and pretty heavy.


And a "Phil-o-Vision" version :


Meridiani is not so flat after all

If anyone would like a look, I've a new astropoem up on my poetry blog, inspired by our recent views...

http://astropoetry.wordpress.com/2010/05/08/on-the-beach

Hope some of you like it. I think this is a stunning view from a fascinating place.

Stu's poem just begs for a poster collaboration once again.
(How many is that now Stu?) Full-resolution version here - 3.95mb.
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The view is my own version of this image.
The distant "hills" are an artistic interpretation only.
I wanted something with a bit more detail to add to Stu's fine words.

Here is a crop from the full-res version.
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I wonder what the view will be like as Oppy gets closer?!

Wow!!!!!!!!!!!!! Thanks Astro0, that's just beautiful! Love the 'detail' on the hills... :-))

Absolutely stunning! Astro0.
You seem to have coaxed out details where none should be!

Wunderfully evocative image & words .... thanks a lot Astro0 and Stu !

Indeed. Stu & Astro0's collaborations are always extremely evocative.

I understand that the MER team has at times posted some of their work on the walls @ JPL, both their individual efforts and these joint works. We're very lucky that they share them with us!

Fantastic work, y'all!

eoincampbell said: You seem to have coaxed out details where none should be!

As I said, this is an artistic interpretation only.
I painted each 'hill' from scratch and manipulated the foreground dunes from the original MER frames.
We have no idea yet what those 'hills' will really look like close up.
HiRise images have given us clues, but we await Opportunity's arrival to provide the groundtruth.

Those pictures remind me of the various 'enhances' they do in certain TV shows where they pick some part of a picture, and 'enhance' it to basically pull details out of a hat.

Funny how spacecraft never have one on board, when it would be so useful! Of course Astro0 delivers the next best thing!

do not get me started on csi and the others

10 years in the photo darkroom ( `80's to`90's ) then on the computer

looks nice Astro0

Truely amazing work ! The full res pan of the hills is breathtaking. Such incredibles détails there .

I don't know how keen I am on making details where there aren't any. Just sort of defeats the purpose I think...

Oh my, Astro0, it looks so tempting real!

Maybe it would be better to note on it that it is not dedicated for navigation and demonstration purposes

I still believe (untill we get closer...)
...something about the artistic interpretation that gives me that Mars chill!
thanks again for posting,
Eoin

Not if the purpose is to create a piece of art.

There's an intangible quality to great photo processing for me -- it makes me feel like I'm there, flying over or driving by.

For my taste, there's something too slick about the Mars Express images as presented to the public, whereas the massive stitching work and color enhancement of HiRISE and MER images as done by UMSF folks puts me in the landscape. It feels grittier, more realistic.

Thanks for the great work!

The purpose of that pic was clearly to illustrate the theme and feelings of a rover-huggy poem, not to illustrate a scientific text book. Astro0 makes it very clear that it's not an accurate simulation, more of an artistic impression. This isn't new, of course; "pioneer artists" like Albert Bierstadt painted the sunsets and landscapes of the "West" in almost migraine-inducing colours, shades and tones, and enhanced in ways that took them far away from being "realistic" but their purpose was to inspire, excite and beckon the folks back home and make them want to see those places for real. This is what modern space art does, too. I think Astro0's Endeavour Hills image is a genuine piece of space art, and I love how it goes with my scribblings!

This forum is crammed full of 'vertically stretched' pictures, 'enhanced' pictures, 'tweaked' pictures, etc, as well as accurate mosaics, panoramas and colourisations. I think there's more than enough room for both sides of this.

And this is me drawing a line under that debate


-----------------------------

There was a superres sequence of W-SW Endeavour rim/Iazu blanket on 2239. Here's an average of all 16 registered L6 frames. No processing:
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Here it is with 3x vertical stretch:
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Wow. The rim is really looking like a real place now, not just a noisy, hazy outline! On the right part of the Endeavour rim, we can actually see how parts (the dark bits) are facing the inside of the crater. And that dark spot on Iazu is a small crater, that you can see on James' inverse polar map.

Wow fredk! Now that's what I call REAL art!!!

Superb processing.

Leveled and slightly contrast tweaked versions:
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As clean as these look, just imagine what jpl will produce with a proper super-res treatment of the original raw images! Hopefully they'll put out a public release of this soon...

Edit - I forgot to add that the near horizon has dropped substantially in this latest view - we've never seen so much of the rim before. Can't wait to see other parts of Endeavour/Iazu...

Wow, we can almost touch those hills!

Splendid versions fredk, and a great observation choice MERfolks. I look forward to the official version of course, but in the meantime thanks in advance to whoever may decide to add a touch of colour.

While there are more qualified image-mages (than me) around here, I just couldn't resist stealing Fred's superb super-res image and combining it with the R1 image (similarly stretched) into an anaglyph, in 2 x original size. Sorry for the tilt, but I've adjusted it so that you can correspondingly tilt your head slightly to the right for an optimal viewing experience. Hopefully the red-blue colours will also bring about somewhat magical effect.

Any idea of what we are seeing here (black spot) ? A distant crater ? A new rock ?
Click to view attachment

See this post by fredk, Bill; apparently a small crater on Iazu's rim.

Thanks nprev but i spoke about the dark spot in front of Endeavour and not about the crater on Iazu.

I think it's a cobble of some kind but too small to resolve it in the picture.

Hmmm. I'm not so sure there will be an "official version". I might be wrong... usually am... used to that... and they must have taken those images for a reason... but I reckon the MER guys are - understandably - too busy steering Oppy and planning the journey to do much work on this. Apart from on rare occasions, like the recent "Moment In Time" image, images are taken for practical reasons. But you never know, maybe someone there will give it a go. I'd love to see what they do with it too... but personally I think the work being done here by people like Astro0, FredK, Ant and others is more than good enough to keep me happy. In fact, I greatly preferred the Forum's versions of the "faraway hills" view to the official one.

I think the "pretty picture" making is up to us, guys... and that's okay by me.

We've seen other super-res sequences released publicly, like those of Victoria's cliffs. I can't imagine they wouldn't compile it themselves, since they sequenced it, and as soon as they see what they've got, they've got to want to release it. I do look forward to their version, since it'll be properly super-res, unlike my quick and dirty attempt.

Bill and Tesheiner, that black spot is close to the horizon, so it's really far away, so it could be quite large. At first I thought this super-res was just to image the rim, but now I'm wondering whether they might be interested in imaging the route ahead, looking for potential meteorites/science stops on the way. Once the view's opened up, as it seems to be doing now, we should get a good view of the route ahead.

Here's Fredk's new real horizon view in context in Astro0's amazing artificial one, with the color taken from Astro's:
Click to view attachment

Wow! The hi-resolution parts of the rim are amazing, especially toward the right edge of the above. I'm curious about the fairly bright sloping lines there. Has the MRO HiRes given us any details of that area yet?

Exploratorium is rebooting the server or something. BIG update tonight.

It's not as big as it appears. It contains a lot of older images that were downlinked earlier. I found 37 new images in the batch. We've seen this sort of thing happen before at Exploratorium.

Hence the reboot.

A false colour interpretation of those distant hills.
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