Without many words: Some portaits of Opportunity from above.

For some reason it's the shots of her toiling across the open country that get to me. That desert is so big and she and her tracks are so small. Pretty amazing girl, she is. (Pretty amazing achievement, MER team....)

Opportunity update at JPL
http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/status.html

One more set of pictures then off we go...

I know I have followed Oppy drive every mile of this, I still can't get my mind around it when I see it in print.

Here is the Navcam panoramic view of Santa Maria
taken on Sol 2538 with the L0 Navcam.

Jan van Driel

Click to view attachment

Very nice!

Here is jvandriel's new pan in a polar view.

Phil

Click to view attachment

Click to view attachment

Normally the polar views don't do much for me visually but this second one is just awesome.

These polar views from Santa maria just remind me on Mimas:

(picture from Wikipedia).

Wow, you're right, it does look like Mimas!

Phil

Has anyone heard anything science-specific about Ruiz Garcia? What the heck is it?
?New form of well-cemented deep local sediment dug up by impact?
?Impact-welded local sediment?
?Part of the impactor? (Primary or secondary?)
?Something else?

Before Oppy leaves Santa Maria crater, a last "Ansell Adams" view...

Click to view attachment

WOW Stu! very craggy

A last look at Santa Maria.
The panoramic view on Sol 2543.
Taken with the L0 Navcam.

Jan van Driel

Click to view attachment

Can't reach the exploratorium archive today. Using www instead of qt doesn't seem to get to the raw images either. It was working fine yesterday.

I've already emailed the webmaster, earlier today. They're working on it.

Exploratorium back again. Great work, Ron!

This recent shot has a nice mini-canyon through the fantastical rocks of Santa Maria.

Click to view attachment

Good catch, walfy. Those rocks are especially fantastical in 3D. Yours is a good example of the amazing views that are completely missed by those who don't bother to look at the rover's stereo imagery.

Great anaglyph! And you can really see how coarse-grained the rocks are here compared with many that we've seen along the way.

Phil

Now if Doug or Adrian would do a DEM, we could take a mosquito's flight through it.

The terrain wedges from surface stereo pairs make it to the PDS - but they're notoriously ugly data.

A final tribute to Santa Maria Crater from Stu and I in the form of a new 'poemster'.
Click to view attachment

Full version on my blog and a great wrap up on Santa Maria and Oppportunity's departure on Stu's Road to Endeavour blog.

Enjoy

The best in 3D of the latest Santa Maria rock images. The others were a bit headache inducing, but still very cool.

Click to view attachment

I like these "Oh yeah, we've been there" shots:
http://qt.exploratorium.edu/mars/opportuni...2M1.JPG?sol2543
Farewell, Santa Maria...

Really nice work, Walfy... soooo tempting to just reach into the screen and scrape your fingers over that rough rock, isn't it?

Coming from you, that is a special compliment! At night I think touching those rocks would give you frostbite in seconds! With the sun on them, perhaps more tolerable.

I have to admit that I Photoshopped it a little by first forcing some detail out of the shadows, which gives more depth to that mini-chasm. That brightens everything up, which I've found makes it better for viewing with the glasses on since the glasses darken everything a little. Then I apply a little sharpening. This is done to each image separately, before bringing the two together.

Sol 2552..Making tracks
Click to view attachment

From recent batch of images, a Santa Maria rock with protuberances (or whatever the proper geological term is) that render nicely in 3D. A martian Porcupine Rock of sorts!

Click to view attachment

The rock's impressive, definitely (and excellent work on the anaglyph! ) but my eye's drawn to the beautifully subtle patterns on the dust at its base... they're really lovely, I think...

I noticed that too. Lots of beauty along with all the science on Mars.

Here is the last Panoramic view of Santa Maria.
Taken on Sol 2543,2545 and 2547 with the L2 Pancam.

Jan van Driel

Click to view attachment

Great work, absolutely stunning view, thanks for that

Colourised view of Walfy's previously posted scene...

Click to view attachment

Very nice!

(My apologies, admins, if this is off topic). By the way, there's a Firefox add-on called Download Helper that I just discovered (http://www.downloadhelper.net/), which lets me download all the mars images listed on any of the directory pages at exploratorium.edu, automatically. Much better than my manual method of yore. Then I can quickly view the images as thumbnails using Adobe Bridge (or any other similar app, such as LightRoom or Aperture). Perhaps many of you already know about it, but thought I'd mention it now. You can even set a file-size limit if you don't want to see countless photos of the sun as taken from Mars! But those are always mind blowing nevertheless.

An advantage of viewing the thumbnails lined up in Bridge is that I can get a mini 3D preview of the images by telling Bridge to sort them by file-name, which arranges each Left and Right image side by side if you set it right. This works if you "sort" the images "by filename," as each day's batch of images are in numerical order and each L and R image are usually in sequence, hence ending up right next to each other. the Left one shot first, the Right shot just afterwards.

I prefer to view them in 3D by the "looking through" method: my left eye falling on Left image, right eye on Right image. I find this much less headache inducing then cross-eyed method. If you prefer cross-eyed viewing, then you have to sort the images by descending order.

It might be worthwhile to get one of those old-time 3D stereoscopes that allowed you to view two large side-by-side aerial images on a page, but instead rig it onto a computer screen, set the thumbnails to a larger size to fit perfectly under each lens, and view these beautiful Mars images in large-size 3D without the red/cyan glasses. Using stereoscopes would render a much sharper and brighter 3D experience probably. I'll try to find these glasses online, report later if everything works.

If I only had their equipment now:

Click to view attachment
Wanted: centuries-old device for viewing images beamed from distant planetary robotic explorer.

You're aware of MMB, right?

It won't do the side by side images your talking about but it is worth it for the downloading and sorting into folders (by sol) alone.

I wasn't aware of that! Looking forward to checking it out. Thank you. A bit of newbie here

Here is the panoramic L2 view of Santa Maria
taken on Sol 2539 and Sol 2540.

Jan van Driel

Click to view attachment

and the colorized version because it is the
last view of Santa Maria.

Jan van Driel

Click to view attachment

Also, there's a forum topic for MMB that may be of use to you. Mike isn't doing tech support/bug fixes for MMB anymore, but it works fine without that -- I rely on it every day. One thing that Mike has started doing recently is Tweeting whenever he does a metadata update, so now I look for his Tweets to remind me when to run my own MMB update.

It's taken a while for me to get around to this - the second colour Santa Maria panorama.



James

Full inline quite removed - ADMIN
Wonderful, James. I can't await to see a full panorama from you of the endeavour crater as seen from Cape York.

Superb! You've got those brown Martian shadows beautifully there.