Re: SF Valley -- My McMansion will be on the approaching side of Endeavour. In Mars gravity, maybe I could hit a golf ball all the way to Stu's Crater!

http://maps.google.com/?ie=UTF8&ll=34....354.38,,0,16.61

That sort of place Dan?

Ah yes, a shot from the Southern rim. What I meant was a a pan from the CENTER of the Valley. But you'd have to get on a tall building to see over all the other structures. Honestly though, Van Nuys is an unpleasant place to visit unless you are getting some body work done on your car or arranging a large printing job.

Re: Van Nuys Giga Pan

100 jokes are swirling through my tiny brain.

Ned Kelly! Funny... yes, it looks just like him!

Phil

Nice try Phil but that's Crocodile Dundee and you must have Photoshopped him in in your photo. I hate to disagree with a senior member but here's the empirical (Aus style) proof that it was Ned Kelly in my undoctored photo.

Click to view attachment

(Death of Sergeant Kennedy by Sydney Nolan)

That's no Crocodile Dundee! A virtual Mars Bar for the first person to correctly identify the shadow in my picture.

Phil

Phil my gut reaction was that your's was a nod to Freddie Krueger but his hat was a Fedora - that shadow looks more of like an Abe Lincoln style to me but the rim is a bit weird.

Oh no, there's a strong Aussie connection. In fact, I once told an Australian woman that this person (the shadow) was my main source of information about Australia. She was very deeply offended (as I had anticipated).

Phil

Whatever happened to "Keeping UMSF at an 'impressively high level"?

Oh yeah, I forgot about that...

Phil

Wild guess -- it's the hat of Sherlock Holmes?

***and yes, this thread is side-tracked -- for scientific investigations

What else can we do when there are no pictures from Mars?

Sherlock Holmes? What's antipodal about him?

Phil

Okay, gotta beg a hint: Is this related to a media and/or cultural figure in the UK or Canada? I'm totally at a loss here!

British... with Ozzie roots... and there's a clue in the filename...

Phil

Ha! Barry "Bazza" McKenzie?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_McKenzie

As a proud Australian...I think that conversation should stop right here.
Barry McKenzie!?! Phil, be ashamed, be very ashamed. Surely Alvin Purple would better represent us

Enough!

Meanwhile back on Mars...

Yes -

Oh, I'm ashamed! (heh heh) A virtual Mars Bar to nprev! I grew up with good old Bazza in the pages of Private Eye, and I still have all the books of collected strips.

OK, back to Mars. Time to point Pancam at the - uh - plains.

Phil

Indeed. (However, I'm diggin' my vMars Bar...my first! )

Hey - we've been relegated to the junk drawer! Yeah, OK, we've finished now.

Phil

Feel free to continue the discussion here.

This is going to be a place to put off topic discussions that start to tangle with the main discussion. If it was really bad it would get deleted. This is where we will put stuff we don't want to throw away but we need to clean up because company is coming.

If anyone has a better name, "The Box Under the Bed", the Garage, whatever, we can reconsider what to call it.

Right on!

brellis--bet you did not expect the honor of being Topic Starter for this esteemed thread

I'm sure it will be extremely useful as things tend towander from time to time.

How about "Parking Orbit"?

OK, so now this is in a 'dusty' hardly read corner of UMSF I feel free to tell the true story. Astro0 has a good point about Alvin.

Central Australian logic quickly gets to the root of this logical conundrum ........ "Bazzanya, paluru wati mulupa nyinatja wiya. Palura panya nyintja wiya, palumpa photo kilipi Martja ku mantankga putu mantjilpai. Tjurkurpa nyangatja tjukururu wiya". (Pitjantjajtara is one of our lovely Centralian languages).

Translated roughly as this.... "Bazza is not a real person. Since he's not a real person, then it's not possible to take a photo of him on the surface of Mars. It's not logical."

On the other hand, ALVIN IS REAL. (ikaringanyina!!)

Several unproductive posts moved from the "Opportunity Map" thread

Dear Tesh, do you have less strongly compressed big map? At x2, jpeg artifacts are quite visible in the image you attached, can you save it from your master file with higher quality setting?

It's already saved with almost no compression at all -- 9 in a scale of 1 (heavy compression) to 10 (no compression). If I use the next setting (10) the file size becomes almost 6MB and that's a big no, no.
The problem, as I see, is that you are trying to zoom into the map (e.g. x2) and it was not intended for that purpose. If you want to see more details as in this 1m/pix map I suggest to use Google Earth and the route map in its KML version.

What I see is definitely JPEG artifacts (blocking).
Re "quality 9": yes, quality 9 will have some distortions. But it's not true that quality 9.5 is not possible.
Do you mind trying other program to do the conversion?
For example, in Gimp JPEG compression can be set with finer granularity - the scale is not 1..10 but 1..100.
I use 95 for photos where I do want negligible data loss.

Yes there are jpeg artifacts - but so what? The purpose of the image is to show Oppy's current position, that is more than clear enough.

The map is downscaled from the full HiRISE image so it is not really the best thing to look at in detail, artifacts or no artifacts. If you want to look closely at the terrain then do as Tesheiner posted previously and look at it in GE. Then you get the full 25cm resolution.

Remember that the map gets posted time and time again and in the end this takes a lot of space that has to be hosted/backed up, so making the file sizes bigger is not desirable.

Den, you're asking for something totally and utterly pointless. Moreover, it would just fill up UMSF's server quicker.

The quality of ET's maps is already more than good enough for the purpose for which they are intended.

Discussion over.

UNNECESSARY QUOTING REMOVED - Admin

I love these side-by-side comparisons. Have you thought of embedding text within the images stating in some way that they are doctored images? Lazy news reporters or bloggers might grab some for use in articles without reading carefully. This thought came to mind after reading about Emily Lakdawalla's episode with some minor image manipulations she put online that caused some misunderstandings. For the sake of good science, which is getting battered in some quarters, especially here in the U.S.! Just a thought and not a critique of your excellent work.

I agree that doctored photos, especially photogenic stuff like these recent crater comparisons, should have something embedded in the image that will clue the unwashed masses in that this is not simply some shot taken directly by a camera. Years ago a vice-president of a company I worked for had a montage photo of Jupiters' moons (with Jupiter in the background) mounted on his office wall and I was never able to convince him that it was a collection of different photos and that those moons would never, in reality, be in the positional relationship that photo presented them in.

Given that the description of what they are and how they are made is right here at the place where the images are to be found, I see no reason to suspect a message on the image would have any more impact.

Consider your boss.... if in the bottom corner it said 'Photo montage' - he would be none the wiser. If you were unable to convince him, right there, in conversation... no text qualifier on the image would manage it either.

Every single image here is doctored in some way at some stage by some means. If someone is so uninformed as to need to be reminded of that every time they see an image... there really is very little we can do for them. In the case of Emilys recent adventure - the people commenting were nothing but conspiratorial nut jobs. No message, qualifier, cautionary comment or bi-line would convince them otherwise. Emily came right out and said, clear as anything... I made it, this is how, this is why it looks like it does... and people STILL piped up about the obvious conspiracy it proved must exist.

In brief - why compromise an image with un-necessary text to accommodate idiots?

/\

What he said.

Perhaps true, but "...not claiming 100000% scientific accuracy" is not much of a disclaimer.

I would not consider someone an idiot if they did not realize from that post the nature of the image. Also, I hate to see such base language used in an otherwise reputable forum.

'Base Language'. Really? REALLY?

I guess your standards are catastrophically different to my own.

It's about the politest word I could possibly use to describe people such as those that wrote at length about the conspiracy proven by Emily's Cassini image.





Care to quote that in full and not selectively pull out a small section of it?

"And, as always, just for fun - not claiming 100000% scientific accuracy - here's a pic showing Endurance (top), Santa Maria (middle) and Victoria roughly to scale..."

That's more than enough disclaimer.

Of course, you are free to add your own disclaimer to your own contributions to UMSF. I notice you've not felt it necessary to do so :

http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.p...st&id=21641 ( OMG What happened to Jupiters rings!! )
http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.p...st&id=21775 ( What the? GIANT YELLOW CIRCLE ON MARS )
http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.p...st&id=21384 ( Street sign on mars clear sign of intelligence )
http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.p...st&id=21248 ( See - they sent a second rover to hide the evidence of life, how else did they take this photo? )
http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.p...st&id=20887 ( Mimas is going to impact Tehthys ! )


I will not be doing so. It's unnecessary.

Now that we're in the junk drawer, I guess I'll respond.

A couple of different issues were mixed in your post. Someone misinterpreting Stu's image is a very different situation than someone claiming Emily's image is a NASA cover up. I think it is unfair to lump them into the same category.

Definitely enough for UMSF regulars. Not clear at all to the passers by. I'm not calling for more of a disclaimer, I'm calling for less insider snobbery. It would be perfectly understandable for a casual reader to misunderstand that image. No big fault of Stu's, but no big fault of the reader's either. Certainly no reason to lump them in with the worst of the conspiracy theorists.

As I said - I consider it more than enough disclaimer. I will not be adding disclaimers to thing I make. Feel free to add them to things you make (something you have not done, to date)

You also said "Perhaps true, but "...not claiming 100000% scientific accuracy" is not much of a disclaimer."

Stu's post included far far more disclaimer than you have used for images you have posted.

Ahem.
Discussion over folks.

Good call.

Indeed; I felt my answer addressed his question. The inclination of the moon's orbit isn't a function of Mars' obliquity.

So the equatorial orbits are a temporary coincidence, and we don't have to worry about explaining them when we address the question of the satellite origins?

Phil

Indeed.

The group of extrasolar hot Jupiters in retrograde/inclined orbits relative to their star, unless there's a major difference between how it works between rigid and fluid primary bodies, points to a lack of ability to change the inclination of the secondary's orbit via the primary's obliquity.

If I'm reading it right, this paper:
http://iopscience.iop.org/1538-3881/135/4/1151/fulltext
seems to hypothesize an "oblateness force" on Phobos and Deimos that keeps them in equatorial orbits throughout Mars obliquity cycle because of relative small sizes and close distances of the moons.

There is another mention somewhere on the web that does say that Mars is coincidentally in the middle of its obliquity cycle at the present time, though.

@stevesliva

Interesting!
I was wrong.
Thanks for that. I've learned something new. I'll have to research this more.

As I said before, I know nothing about orbital dynamics. But I had thought that an oblate object's equatorial 'bulge' applied a torque on an orbiting moon that pulled it into an equatorial orbit. It doesn't work for our Moon, or Iapetus, because they are too distant. It might not work for those hot Jupiters because the stars are not oblate (or an oblate outer layer has too little mass to have an effect). Can anyone say more? How about Saturn's axial precession? Isn't the whole inner Saturnian system following the planet as it precesses? Seems to me the solar system would be a real mess if this wasn't happening.

Phil