Originally posted by JibbyJedi
reply to post by RARARAsputin
The shiny dots may be white pixels, I've seen a bunch of them in the photos zoomed in. That guy Skipper from the Mars anomaly site said it's the
result of JPEG manipulation.
This almost prompted me to lend a little tutorial about jpeg compression (illustrated), but unless I hear requests, it's not worth the time. I will
however say it's not 'manipulation' its compression interpolation artifacts, and coupled with auto-server downgrade of the compressed image weird
things show up if you happen to study jpeg images to the point you see individual pixels. Its what the compression does. It will value average in a
grid, at a lower count of grayscale depending on the amount of compression used, or how much a web server forces. White dots can appear in areas that
are a bit brighter but smaller than a pixel, thus the averaging. (Mac developed H-264 video compression encoding is more sophisticated).
In all .gov sites I get images from, the compression seems more severe than the pixel count would necessitate, so what normally appears are square
areas, about 9 by 9 pixels square that form an array that is not there. Remote and motion shots, like from AF.mil, Navy.mil, and so on seem to have
these patterns when the pixel count would allow for smooth gradations, that's the Joint Photographic Experts Group
(JPEG, extension jpg) compression (developed as the web standard around 1992) that compresses 38 MB files
to about 2 for download on average, much more than zipping a file of the same pixel count. I learned a trick around 92 to get a digital art created
file that was 69 MB on to a floppy disc, yes under 1.6 MB.
Camera still shots don't have as much noise as motion or remote transfer ones, the transfer can also add noise in the reception of the data
transmitted.
Do people think there really are bugs and creatures on Mars? What would they eat? Iron oxide? Silicate? Would they drink gasoline? Get serious. Not a
carbon based life form does that.
BTW the dark spots on one of the two stereo cameras should prove it was dust, Mars is in perpetual dust. It must suck to live there.