Curiosity sends home Panorama Beside 'Namib Dune' , Mount Sharp

a reply to: butcherguy

Sixty mile an hour winds will move little chunks of sand, even in a thin atmosphere. Martian dust storms can span the planet before they weaken and die off, carrying material from place to place. Dunes on Earth can change shape in much less time, move far faster, because of our higher atmospheric density.

originally posted by: 3n19m470
a reply to: Danowski

Well its understandably confusing when they say things like

the result of white-balancing, which interprets the scene as if it were viewed under Earthlike lighting conditions.

When they say things like that, it kind of makes it seem, to us laymen, that the image they are showing us is not what we would see on mars with our own eyes. It kind of makes it look like they are saying that this is what we would see in some alternate universe where mars has earth like lighting conditions instead of mars like lighting conditions.

I was a little bit harsh up there, my apologies for that.

And you are absolutely right, the phrase "if it were viewed under Earthlike lightning conditions" produces more confusion than anything else.


The most important thing we should talk about is RAW Data - otherwise anything else will be useless.
RAW Data is awesome, plain simple If you're taking pictures with the RAW format it saves every possible setting (and therefore outcome), not just the one which is used (like JPEG).

Think of it as a time machine. It allows you to go back in time, in the exact moment the picture is taken and change the shutter speed (brightness adjustment) or Kelvin (white/color balance) without manipulating the picture at all. The camera has all the information stored, you just choose the right one afterwards because the moment was too fast gone to realize you made a mistake.



White Balance is the first thing you'll see the camera crew doing when the setting (light) is changed. For example, the next scene (of a documentary) is filmed in a room with old light bulbs (yellow) which produce a different color than modern LED's (white/blue/green; depends how #y the LED is ).

Your eyes will adjust immediately and a white piece of paper is still white. But your camera hasn't adjusted - what to do? Hold a white piece of paper in front of the camera, press White Balance and your camera, just like your eyes, will adjust to the current light settings. So that the color X appears in its true color - X.

This is an example working with a video camera. It is the same process if you take pictures, but thanks to RAW Data we are able to change this afterwards without manipulating the image.


Brightness Adjustment. It's the same as before our badass camera, also known as the human eye, will adjust to brightness immediately. We all know this effect, you're sitting in a dark room and after a few minutes you'll be able to see more than before because your eyes adjusted to the light setting. But, our camera doesn't.

Professionals don't use the Automatic Mode on a camera, that's why the settings can be off from time to time. And thanks to RAW Data we can adjust the brightness to the actual setting it was (how our eyes perceived it, not how the camera captured the moment with the wrong adjustment.

NASA is working with the same issues like any hobby photograph but between them and their equipment is a little bit more distance

the result of white-balancing, which interprets the scene as if it were viewed under Earthlike lighting conditions.

This is just blahblahblah from a layman for a layman, of course no one understands it

Hope this is somehow understandable, if not, please feel free to ask! And I'm gonna do a thread on this with examples.

As a prospector when I look through that image, all I can think is how I'd love to take my pan, shovel and classifier there and see what I can find.

Though more than anything I'd like to find life up there.

originally posted by: wildespace

originally posted by: charolais

A color adjustment has been made approximating a white balance, so that rocks and sand appear approximately as they would appear under Earth's sunlit sky. A brightness adjustment accommodates including rover hardware in the scene.

This is the part that I don't like. I don't care about what it would look like IF it were Earth... I want to know what it looks like on Mars!

Here's a visual guide for you:

These three versions of the same scene on Mars, captured by NASA's Curiosity rover, reflect three different choices that scientists can make in presenting the colors recorded by the camera. The left version is the raw, unprocessed color view as it is received directly from Mars. The center rendering is an estimate of the "natural" color that humans would see if they visited Mars. The right version shows the result of white-balancing, which interprets the scene as if it were viewed under Earthlike lighting conditions.

www.nbcnews.com...

Any colour calibration is a bit arbitrary, and I tend to imagine Mars more-or-less the way it looks like in MAHLI camera images:

But the only real way to know is to send people up there, or even just send a normal DSLR camera that would take the same kind of images as photographers take on Earth.

So... as it turns out, simply looking for the answer instead of assuming that "something isn't right" will once again provide the facts. SMH. . .

a reply to: gortex

who'd of thought such a thin atmosphere would do that.

There are other considerations:

Martian Storms Point To Electric Universe

www.rense.com...

originally posted by: Navieko
As a prospector when I look through that image, all I can think is how I'd love to take my pan, shovel and classifier there and see what I can find.

It would be interesting to dab a little bit of water on some of the rocks to get a better idea of what's going on with them. As a prospector I imagine you've spit on and rubbed a lot of rocks.

originally posted by: GaryN
a reply to: gortex

who'd of thought such a thin atmosphere would do that.

There are other considerations:

Martian Storms Point To Electric Universe

www.rense.com...

This NASA article answers many issues raised by Talbott: www.nasa.gov...

Large global dust storms put enough dust in the air to completely cover the planet and block out the sun, but doing so ultimately dooms the storm itself. The radiative heat of sunlight reaching the surface of the planet is what drives these dust storms.

As sunlight hits the ground, it warms the air closest to the surface, leaving the upper air cooler. As in thunderstorms on Earth, the warm and cool air together become unstable, with warm air rising up and taking dust with it.

Rising plumes of warm air create everything from small dust devils, similar to those that form in deserts on Earth, to larger continent-sized storms. These larger storms sometimes combine into the global storms, which cover the entire planet in atmospheric dust.

Larger storms typically only happen during summer in Mars’ southern hemisphere. Seasons on Mars are caused by the tilt of the planet, like on Earth. But Mars’ orbit is less circular than Earth’s; for part of a Martian year, the planet is closer to the sun and therefore significantly hotter. This warmer time is during the southern hemisphere’s summer, so radiative heat forces are strongest then. Once started, bigger storms can last weeks to months.

Speaking of white-balancing (or just colour-balancing), you can try this trick using your own eyes:

While outdoors on a sunny day, shut your eyes for a minute, so that you see orange light getting through your eyelids. When you open your eyes, the world will look more green-blue than usual. That's because while your eyes were receiving that orange light, they adjusted to it, becoming less sensitive to orange and more sensitive to green-blue.

See, you can't even trust your own eyes!

But on a serious note, when standing on Mars, your vision would likewise adjust to its reddish hues, and you'll probably see the landscape in more subdued tones than the usual vivid red or orange hues so common in movies and illustrations.

Here's another image from Curiosity's MAHLI camera:

That image in the OP is amazing. It is unbelievable how clear it is. ~$heopleNation

In case anyone's interested, here are the original raw images used to make that panorama: mars.nasa.gov...

It must be said that the raw Mastcam images from Curiosity have a green bias, so don't take those pics to mean that Mars is really green.

I also like this photo of the dune's foot: mars.nasa.gov...

NASA Rover Report on the dunes and near term plans for Curiosity.