Why, oh why, when we look to the sky, does this beautiful planet dead look so red??

(Point being from earth it looks red. Why are so many of you convinced it's got a blue atmosphere and they're hiding it from us?!)

If that picture was taken near dusk or dawn, or durring a dust storm it could be true color. However, i honestly question that myself.

after starring at those rocks for a while, that NASA says are only 4 inches high and where possibly blown by the wind (yea right).

It just dawned on me that (what if) that is a decomposing structure, say of something that looks similar to a dragon or a dinasour. That has just been uncovered by recent wind activity. It could have been slowly decomposing or petrafing for thousands or millions of years.

Do you see the triangle shape head, the long body, what looks like a leg folded back, a spine type structure and possibly a bony whip like tail ?

or maybe its a long body space craft that crashed on Mars and is slowely rotting away.

Maybe thats why all of a sudden NASA is like, well thats REALLY unexpected and peculiar. They only say stuff like that when something catches them off guard. You would think they had a detailed landing area map with key structures in mind.

????

This whole color thing is confusing me. I thought I understood Kano's explanation...but then I see beautiful color pictures taken by ESA Mars Express and then these boring red brown NASA pics.

How can ESA and NASA have such major differences in their color perspective? Don't they both use Filters??

and that bedrock stuff....When I first saw it, I thought of a flagstone walkway or driveway...

Originally posted by Kriskaos
Data from the panoramic camera's near-infrared, blue and green filters were combined to create this approximate, true-color image.

This is not a color image. It may look like color, but the red is not really red. It is infared.

Nice is that from your photoshop job or image file from nasa? I never said that I agreed that , that was the TRUE color. great i cant wait for the release of more pics.

I know its my imagination, but i think the far right looks like Dino tail. looks like bone. im sure its not.

Originally posted by Kriskaos
Nice is that from your photoshop job or image file from nasa? I never said that I agreed that , that was the TRUE color. great i cant wait for the release of more pics.

That's a simple RGB combination of NASA's raw image data, with the following filenames released from Sol004:

1P128542307EFF0205P2354L4M1.jpeg
1P128542417EFF0205P2354L5M1.jpeg
1P128542483EFF0205P2354L6M1.jpeg

I wouldn't really call that a "photoshop job", since that implies (to me at least) that alterations and/or color adjustments have been made.

None have been made in the above picture. It's a straight bit-for-bit combination of NASA's own red, green and blue filter data.

If you try comparing L2 frames to L4 frames in these sequences, you'll see that the rocks and portions of the soil show up substantially brighter in infrared than in red... which points out why the use of the L2 filter is inappropriate in this case, unless you happen to be someone who sees in infrared but NOT human-red. The use of L2 makes the red signal too bright.

Yes, those are all good examples of the types of color differences present while in the midst of a sandstorm... and I already referenced above that the colors would be different during and immediately after a sandstorm.

But we also know that sandstorms are not constant on Mars, and know that there are constraints on just how much blue and green light must be present to ensure the operation of the solar cells.

Visibility is much better in a lot of Mars pictures than in the sandstorm pictures above. Once the density of particulates drops enough to ensure that we are getting good power levels and good visibility, it is no longer possible for the majority of light at the surface to be scattered/reflected red light from particulates.

We therefore know that the sky is often relatively clear, and would expect only the sort of typical minor particulate haze that people expect as normal in terrain shots taken over large distances.

Distant objects will appear more hazy, and the sky will wash towards a whitish color near the horizon, where the visible distance through the haze is greatest. As the view is shifted upward, the haze effect naturally falls off and "sky color" begins to dominate.

There is simply no compelling reason to expect that the dominant feature in Martian surface lighting is ALWAYS red reflected light from particulates. The other evidence rules this out as a reasonable explanation.

Hubble photographs also strongly indicate that the atmospheric "limb" of Mars shows as blue, not red as would be expected if the predominant atmospheric color effect is due to suspended particulates. These shots are taken through the MAXIMUM atmospheric cross-section (a tangent to the surface at the edge of the planet), so any particulate coloration should be MORE intense on Hubble images, rather than less intense or non-existent.