My mind's eye has been pretty set on the view into Endeavour as compared to the view of the San Fernando Valley from Mulholland Dr.

To help rover driver Scott (and the rest of us) visualizing the size of Endeavour, I think It could be cool to put some Empire State Buildings or Eiffel Towers into the panoramas of the crater. We need something a little bigger than Mystery Man for those distances! It would be especially interesting to see those buildings giving scale to Tribulation and to the mountains on the other side of the crater. Anyone up for it?

Great idea! You should give it a go!

Oh, that would be way above my feeble skills... - I defer to the experts!

That's the way I used to think, too, but gave it a go and gradually I've made it to the 'not bad if I say so myself!' level. And
really there's room here for everyone's efforts, and you won't learn unless you try, will you?

Very nice. I like the view from the end of Reseda past the golf course. The mountains are too high of course, but the distance to the Santa Susanas above Granada Hills is roughly accurate.

Great idea, but I'd go for a Saturn V.

A couple stereo pairs of Fairview.

Most of us have seen either one or the other of the two buildings but very few - I guess - have seen the Saturn V in person. Anyway, any well-known landmark would do perfectly well, maybe it would be even better with even bigger landmarks, small mountains for instance. Or a cruise ship or supertanker standing on its end...

True, but I think we'd get used to it. One check against something you knew would do the calibration. I was thinking it would be a nice homage to all those space artists from Chesley Bonestell onward who have portrayed rockets standing on the surface of Mars.

Nice, but be advised that these are not x-eyed stereo, and one can sproing one's eyes trying to view au naturel.

Easy cut-and-paste fix at home, though.

--Bill

What's the fix? I ask just for information purposes - I've never been able to view stereo pairs au naturel myself.

Simple-- in an image editor, swap the images left-right. The "right channel" image needs to be on the left and and the "left channel" image needs to be on the right for "cross-eyed" viewing. It's an acquired habit and one that needs practice. And it helps to be nearsighted.

Most of the close-in Pancam stereo pairs need to be rotated and aligned because of the way the camera mast moves, and L257 and R721 images need to be color-matched, so you've done 90% of the work already. Thanks!

--Bill

Here is my first crude attempt at putting the Eiffel Tower in Endeavour Crater

The Eiffel is almost exactly 1000 feet tall
The crater is almost 14 miles across, so half way across is 7 miles or roughly 40K feet
At that distance a 1000 foot object would appear 1.43 degrees tall. (right triangle math)
Each Pancam pixel resolves 0.28 mrads
1.43 degrees is about 24 mrads
So the tower would be about 80 pixels tall at 40,000 feet away.
I found a silhouette online and shrunk it to 80 pixels.
(please check my math....)

I put the Eiffel on top of the center mound in the crater, thinking it represented about halfway across.
(i didn't tilt the image to match the tower, so we have a leaning tower of eiffel...)

Your mileage may vary...

Click to view attachment

The winds of Mars sandblast the rocks in such a way that uncanny projections stick way out at times, more so than we see on Earth. I would guess due to the weaker gravity. This new one is exceptionally top-heavy:

Click to view attachment

Its probably not so much lower gravity causing these unlikely balanced rocks as it is a lack of other forces acting on them on the plains of Meridiani. They sit there for millions of years with nothing but the slow steady erosion of wind and the gentle pull of gravity eroding ever so slowly in the same direction for eons. There is no frost heaving, nor snow melt, nor glaciers, nor any erosion caused by any water of any kind. There are no earthquakes, no land slides and very little mass-wasting in this region. No trees falling over, no animals stomping on them, no tree roots pushing up from under them. I'm guessing that we won't see as many balancing-egg structures in the steep canyons of Valles Marineris where landslides and slumping are more common or near the poles where the frosts come and go seasonally.

A while back (actually, about 5 years ago) we had a discussion regarding vertical exaggeration in HiRise stereo pairs. The geometry is fairly straightforward and the HiRise site provides the required information about the viewing angles from which the angular separation between the images can be determined. I posted an Excel spreadsheet back then which calculates the vertical exaggeration for a defined image pair based on the distance between your eyes and your monitor.

If you are comfortable with editing spreadsheets, you can use this one to calculate the vertical exaggeration inherent in the pair of images used in an anaglyph, if you know which HiRise images were used.

Just snagged yesterday's 18:35 data upload. No new Pancam morsels but we have a new 360 deg Navcam pan, which is always great for context and circular pans. Looks like Oppy is continuing to tiptoe along the ridgetop towards "winterhaven" with the light-toned (reddish, actually) wind-deflated area to the right (east) and the rippled, net-deposition area in the wind shadow to the left (west).

--Bill

According to the "telemetry", this last drive moved the rover left of the ridgetop. I will provide a map update later on.

...but we've been moving along the west (left) side of the ridgetop since we hit Shoemaker Ridge. The heading will change more northward, in the direction of "winterhaven".

--Bill

3D view of latest panorama... loving those hills...

http://twitpic.com/752kts

Crop of faraway hills...

Click to view attachment

Crude yes, but a good first attempt! If you got the size right, then this is actually the first image that really tells me, viscerally, how big Endeavour is.

Now it would be good to plop the Eiffel Tower down in an image with a zoom-factor of around 50mm, which approximates that of the human eye.

I just finished Bill Bryson's Australia book "Down Under" on the plane today, and came across this: "Uluru is not merely a very splendid and mighty monolith, but also an extremely distinctive one. More than this, it is very possibly the most immediately recognizable natural object on earth. I'm suggesting nothing here, but I will say that if you were an intergalactic traveller who had broken down in our solar system, the obvious directions to rescuers would be: 'Go to the third planet and fly around till you see the big red rock. You can't miss it.'"

- Well, since I walked around Ayer's Rock one enchanted January day this year, I have to agree with Bryson. I and my sore footsoles have a really good feel for how big it is, so that geological wonder would be another good size indicator for me at least...

Now I couldn't resist giving that a go...!

1) Uluru vs Cape York...

Click to view attachment

2) Uluru vs Endeavour Crater...

Click to view attachment

Fascinating!

(and a great idea for a blog post, thanks! )

360x90 anaglyph Navcam panorama centered on north for sol 2754

You're welcome!
- Soeren

Ok, walking around Uluru was a leisurely 4-hour walk, so Cape York wouldn't take much more than half an hour. As for Endeavour Crater.... Wowsers! Even bigger than I thought: it is positively humongous...

Now for those perspective views in images taken at a focal length of 50mm...

(And sorry for not doing them myself, but I am sitting at work computers with nothing more than "Paint" on them...)

'Fairview' sol 2753
Pancam flicker gif L257 R2-1

Click to view attachment

Pancam "drive direction" anaglyph sol 2754, facing approximately NE

What are Oppy's chances of getting a "cleaning event" as it advances up the hillside at Cape York? Do we know anything about the wind patterns around Endeavour?

Circular version of mhowards's anaglyph... I find that one problem with using the anaglyph like this is that the seam where the end meet (south in these views) is messed up a bit, where it would not be with a normal panorama. But it's not too bad.

Small hill on the horizon due west - it's Pathfinder Mound.

Phil

Click to view attachment

Neat, Phil. I suspected that the bump to the due west was Pathfinder Mound, but I am puzzled by the similar bump to the NW (about N45W). My older Route Maps are archived away but the one "large scale" reference shows just a very eroded crater there, or possibly a small ridge along that azmuth. Most of my good HiRISE maps are near the travserse path for use as context.

At any rate, this is, I believe, our first "lookback" towards the Meridiani highland since we arrived at CY.

I guess I'll go back to posting left, right and anaglyph for the Navcam panoramas, unless I get complaints about using too much disk space. The tradeoff is you won't get thumbnails.

Sol 2754 360x90 degree Navcam left right

Mariner 9 (aka "Approach Crater") is on that heading but I'll take this ID with care because it's also twice the distance to Pathfinder Mound.

i am hoping the topography here is more suitable for gusts or vortices to form, at least here more than anywhere since leaving Victoria i would venture to guess, but still just hoping.. you might have missed Stu's interview with one of the flight team (thanks again Stu!) it is highly worth reading..

No telling at this point about that "NW Bump". It lies at the point where the mid-ground horizon on CY intersects with the background horizon on the Meridiani highland, so it may be near or far. We'll be able to tell more in a few days travel as the perspective changes.


The one on the left is Phil's Bump and the one on the right is the Abstruse Bump...

--Bill

Rereading Stu's latest interview with Scott Maxwell -- after all these years it hadn't been readily apparent that being a rover driver is a bit like "feast or famine". You're either in a constant push to map out, execute and review the results of drives, or you're stuck in purgatory, parked in a winter haven or otherwise staying put while the MER is performing all those *science* activities!

Oppy's tracks nicely framed today, with the drop-off to the crater showing up in 3D:

Click to view attachment

Here's a my3D stereo pair of the Pancam foreground on sol 2755, and a couple extras.

nice stereo pairs! (above and in recent posts), unfortunately for me they would have to be reversed to be viewable using the cross-eye method, so im not sure how to view these without any incidental accoutrements. anyone have suggestions?

There is the low-tech method of bringing up two copies of the image, side-by-side, in two browser windows. These can be aligned in such a way as to facilitate cross-eye viewing. The windows can be resized or scrolled as necessary.

It is a shame that that 3D format has the wrong order for cross-eyed viewing, but that format seems to be designed for use with a simple stereoscope (view-master idea, for those old enough!), so that means parallel rather than cross-eyed.

The two-window idea is simple enough. But I use stereophoto maker (for viewing and creating my anaglyphs). To view these stereo pairs, I just drag into stereophoto maker and hit the "swap left/right" button. This has the advantage that you can easily pan across wide cross-eyed pairs (such as full nav or pancams).

Thanks for the link,
that's a great bit of software.

There are now images of the following sites on Shoemaker Ridge at my photo website (URL in signature):

Sol-
02749 p2414 Onverwacht
02753 p2418 Havelock
02751 p2560. Hooggenoeg
02751 p2561 Tjakastad
02753 p2564 Fairview

current pancam_foreground_quarter images

--Bill

.

Totally agree. The parallel method might take a little more practice, but it's pure relaxation compared to the cross-eyed method!

thanks, i tried and got it to work (yes, by *not* trying as Alan Watts would say), and is far easier on the eyes!
The only drawback is that i cant make the image pair much larger than the natural distance beteen my eyes as measured across the computer screen, but for smaller sizes it works great. thanks again for the tip!

For anyone who wants to get started here are some tips:
1) Try this image pair in the post by mhoward.
2) shrink the resltant window to about half size or smaller, the smaller the easier it is get inital focus.
3) look in a very relaxed way at the center so that in this example the white rock in the bottom of the two images suddenly 'snap' together as one, then hold the line!
4) gradually drag the window size larger as large as possible, eventually the stereo effect deteriorates and you lose focus as the distance beteen the focal point for each eye one the screen starts to exceed your interocular distance.

As a bonus, you can also parellelify anaglyphs using the excellent Stereo Photo Maker previously referred to.
Take some of the fine anaglyphs generous folks have posted to UMSF such as Walfy's oppy trails and open as anaglyph, then change to side by side and swap sides, shrink and view!

This is one of the best NavCam shots ever taken by Oppy (... IMHO ... )

Sol 2756. Its a little after 2 o'clock in the afternoon on a far away planet

http://qt.exploratorium.edu/mars/opportuni...V5P1897L0M1.JPG

Here's a slice of that shot for viewing in parallel, not cross-eyed. It's narrow so it can be viewed without special equipment. Still not as spectacular as the original. Unfortunately, this method for 3D viewing without equipment is limited to narrow slices of images in the vertical. It still can be lots of fun.

Click to view attachment

I've been meaning to do this for a while, but was inspired by being lucky enough to meet Jim Bell this week, and look at some recent anaglyphs with him. So, here's my take on the topography of Cape York from my HiRISE DEM (still getting some mileage out of this thing!), showing the slope and the aspect.

Click to view attachment

So because Oppy needs a north-facing slope, you can really see here why they're heading towards the top of Cape York. I'm sure others can pick out some of the possible best areas better than my jetlag will allow.

Pete

Very nice. Thank you.

Love that data, Pete.

Is there any chance you could combine the slope and aspect results?

Maybe run this:

angle = ACOS((sin(slope)*cos(aspect)*sin(sol))+(cos(slope)*cos(sol)))

Where:
slope is measured in radians
aspect in radians from north, going clockwise
sol is 0.576 in radians (90-57 degrees, from the axial tilt and rover latitude)

...to produce a range of angles from 0 to PI to determine the best (angle = 0) attitude for the rover's panels based on slope and aspect for the midwinter noon.

Andy

EDIT: sol is 0.471 in radians (27 degrees - being the winter axial tilt and rover's latitude of 2 degrees south). Thanks Fred!