Can someone explain this NASA Curiosity photo?

Originally posted by nepatitan
tiff files are right here

photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov...

I took those .TIFFS and made a pano - and it's good.

Look at the GigaPan and tell me if you guys still want the 457MB TIFF of the whole thing - uncompressed.

gigapan.com...

The one NASA has up now is screwed up until they fix it.

reply to post by AkumaStreak

I would go with that.
Unlikely to be "grass"...maybe some form of extreme lichen.
I often speculate that some of those pictures that look like trees from orbit maybe some kind of giant fungus, or what if there was some sort of species of coral in Mars's ancient seas that adapted to living out of water?
Who knows right?
Life on Earth survives in some environments that are just as harsh, or harsher...

Edit to add:
If that crater wall is that far away, then it most def isn't grass, and probably not lichen either...unless it's 60 feet tall.

reply to post by nepatitan


ya ok so many skeptics here so i normally don't over do my explanations just point people in the right direction. This photo is one of many and yes NASA have the hi-res photo near it to move your attention away & give a scientific explanation. You'll notice this re-occurring with alot of anomalies on google mars & the moon. And if more blatant ways the image is either smudged or erased totally.

I've been up that road. It's a lovely view from the top

reply to post by jaysbot


you mean like the smokestack building that turned out to be a dust plume from the sky crane crash?


yeah....your "explanations" are priceless and totally accurate.

It could be, clearly Mars gets some Sun, who knows they may stumble on more than we even thought they would. The more I look at all the RAWs I have seen things that look like wood, road, pavement, and other odd colors and shapes.

I suppose now it's just time and hope that NASA will actually share photos of that magnitude with us. I still have a standoffish feeling we won't get the whole story of what they find after the dust settles.

Originally posted by HIWATT

Originally posted by nepatitan
if you look at how much he zooms in, there is NO way you can see texture with a 2mp photo when looking at the crater wall 13 miles away!

You're right.

I've been whining about this for a week now.

$2.5 BILLION DOLLAR SPACE CRAFT.... $20 cameras...... in a day and age when we have cameras that can CAPTURE THE SPEED OF LIGHT

IMHO all the "Curiosity" threads should be dumped into the HOAX bin. NASA is a joke... and it's on us.

edit on 13-8-2012 by HIWATT because: add

I'm quite convinced we are on Mars right now .... so let me ask you this question.. Is it possible that those high speed cameras aren't suitable or wouldn't be able to function properly in the Mars atmosphere? Maybe they have a high sensitivity that would not allow them to work due to the heat and composition on MARS.

Otherwise, Im sure they would have sent them....

Originally posted by nepatitan
Just watched the video..... and I have to be completely honest.
First, running my own photography business I do quite a lot of retouching and editing with Photoshop, probably about 15 hours a week of Photoshop. Now for me, after watching the video the first thing I thought was "What type of monitor is he using in the video" was it calibrated? was it an lcd? Anyone in photography knows consumer brand lcd's are notoriously bad for editing photos and they do show blue much more (due to fluorescent backlight) than a crt or high end lcd specific for photo editing.
I went up to my office and looked at the photo she showed in the video and it looked completely different than what he was showing. My bet is that A. his monitor is not calibrated or B. he doesn't really understand how to use image editing programs, using levels will not magically bring out colors.

Thanks for the reply!

However,
Its not the monitor as the color levels don't lie and could care less what monitor you are using. The RGB levels being dominant in green. I'll post the levels from a professional program for you Photoshop CS6 suffice?

#1f271a is one to be exact
R 31
G 39
B 26

the above color is just one of many that can be pulled from the image with adjusted levels. All the algorithm is doing is adjusting brightness and contrast, it isn't addressing RBG at all...its not creating colors where there weren't any already present. If anything it will change the darkness/contrast of colors already present but it won't magically create the color green...

my question is WHY does the mars image have ANY green in it at all? Adjusting the levels like you said won't magically pull colors out of nowhere...so thus, why is green showing up? The only explanation is that green is actually present in the NASA raw photo and the levels just enhanced it enough for people to see...

Now im not implying anything as the presence of the green in the image could mean multitudes of things. Like was this even taken on mars? Or is this proof of green vegetation on mars? etc...two completely different conclusions that are both possible...

Anyway if you could post a picture of what your setup produced after adjusting levels on the RAW image I would love to see it!!

Originally posted by impaired

Originally posted by nepatitan
tiff files are right here

photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov...

I took those .TIFFS and made a pano - and it's good.

Look at the GigaPan and tell me if you guys still want the 457MB TIFF of the whole thing - uncompressed.

gigapan.com...

The one NASA has up now is screwed up until they fix it.

edit on 8/13/2012 by impaired because: (no reason given)

Thank you for all the input and links for images I will be rummaging through them to see If I can find similar attributes in other mars photos...If I do find any I will post them here!!

Originally posted by RealSpoke
The original NASA photo has unsaturated green tones within it. As you can see here;

Of course when you adjust the levels, it will bring more of the green tones out.

But this is probably just due to the camera, not because Mars has grass.

edit on 13-8-2012 by RealSpoke because: (no reason given)

Thanks for the reply the original NASA photo does indeed have green tones in it so thanks for the validation in that regard. The levels that were adjusted were brightness/contrast only algorithm so all it did was make the already faint and present greens darker so its "easier" to see...

Yes it could very well be the camera and not "mars" itself however, I haven't been able to duplicate this with any other mars photos (yet) using similar cameras. I'm not the most camera versed person but how would it produce faint "green" tones where there are none?

The guy is clearly saying NASA is just taking pics in deserts and retouching them.Then presenting these touched photos as mars.Will you people just watch the video and stop asking what this means etc....I personally believe no rover is on mars cause we are not allowed to leave this atmosphere.Whos stopping us is the question.IDK we can't make a cellphone operational just with a signal nationwide but we can control a signal to a machine on mars flawlessly?This is just propaganda and nothing more.Nothing of scientific achievement has be accomplished.We all know but wont believe it us humans just aint this intelligent.Were doing things that require 250+ I.Qs just think how is this possible when the average in science for humans is 120-160.

reply to post by Sly1one

en.wikipedia.org...
These organisms were introduced by our previous missions to the surface. It may have been accidental or on purpose. I have spoken with NASA scientists about this and they have confirmed that many parts of the spacecrafts were not sterilized. Here in the southwest US the hills appear very green after a rain, but the leafy plants are not giving off the color green, it is the bryophytes in the soil. Many will be angry that we are "contaminating" a sterile planet, I am against them and for terraforming. We can produce a breathable atmosphere in several decades.

Originally posted by rbmgang
The guy is clearly saying NASA is just taking pics in deserts and retouching them.Then presenting these touched photos as mars.Will you people just watch the video and stop asking what this means etc....I personally believe no rover is on mars cause we are not allowed to leave this atmosphere.Whos stopping us is the question.IDK we can't make a cellphone operational just with a signal nationwide but we can control a signal to a machine on mars flawlessly?This is just propaganda and nothing more.Nothing of scientific achievement has be accomplished.We all know but wont believe it us humans just aint this intelligent.Were doing things that require 250+ I.Qs just think how is this possible when the average in science for humans is 120-160.

We get what we pay for. That piece of machinery cost 20 billion to make, of course, its gonna get top of the line technology. If youre paying $40 bucks a month for Boost mobile, dont expect to have clear signal everywhere you go

Originally posted by Sly1one
he makes several other observations that I find pretty interesting as well most notably the distinct dividing line from clear resolution to a foggy haze, it appears to just pop up out of nowhere...

That's very common, it would only look like a perfect gradient on a perfectly flat area, as any rise in the terrain will hide part of the gradient from clear to dusty/foggy.

What I'm most curious about though is why when only adjusting the levels from a NASA original photo does the color green even show up...unless, it wasn't originally there even tho very faint due to the "haze"??

Why wouldn't green be present in a RGB photo?

If the landscape was as devoid of color as proclaimed (most notably green) one would expect a levels adjustment to only reveal darker reds, oranges, and browns...

Proclaimed by who (or is it whom?)?

Anyone else have some thoughts on this?

Why is the sky green? It looks just like the camera needs some calibration.

Originally posted by Sly1one




All the algorithm is doing is adjusting brightness and contrast, it isn't addressing RBG at all...its not creating colors where there weren't any already present.

I'm really sorry dude, but that is incorrect. Adobe provide a tool for only brightness and contrast. The levels tool does a whole lot more. It takes information from the image histogram and adjusts tones to the users preference.

This includes brightness and contrast (black and white), but also tonal preferences (mid tone). Every colour known to man is a tone of red, green or/and blue (primary colours). So when you start messing with the tonal range, you will get curious results.

One thing he says on the video is wrong: when we use that eyedropper, what we are selecting is not "the darkest think on the picture", we are defining what we want to use as black.

If the area selected is not neutral, the colour will change according to the colour of the area we chose.

When he chooses a reddish (although almost black) stone, the program adjusts everything to use that colour as black, so it balances all the colours in the opposite way (the complementary colour) .

See the video below to see what happens when we choose a reddish, a greenish or a blueish black.

Originally posted by blackmetalmist

Originally posted by rbmgang
The guy is clearly saying NASA is just taking pics in deserts and retouching them.Then presenting these touched photos as mars.Will you people just watch the video and stop asking what this means etc....I personally believe no rover is on mars cause we are not allowed to leave this atmosphere.Whos stopping us is the question.IDK we can't make a cellphone operational just with a signal nationwide but we can control a signal to a machine on mars flawlessly?This is just propaganda and nothing more.Nothing of scientific achievement has be accomplished.We all know but wont believe it us humans just aint this intelligent.Were doing things that require 250+ I.Qs just think how is this possible when the average in science for humans is 120-160.

We get what we pay for. That piece of machinery cost 20 billion to make, of course, its gonna get top of the line technology. If youre paying $40 bucks a month for Boost mobile, dont expect to have clear signal everywhere you go

a clarification. the total cost of the Mars Science Laboratory is 2.5 billion dollars. that money was spent over the course of like 6 years.

reply to post by blackmetalmist


well, to be honest, the purpose of curiosity isn't to take 58 megapixel pictures. it's doing experiments. especially to look for life, past or present. some people like to complain when they can't zoom into a picture from mars down to the granular level of sand. then claim that it's because NASA is hiding something it's actually pretty childish, but what can you do? no matter what NASA does, the naysayers will come out and accuse NASA of lying, so instead of trying to placate them, NASA just continues doing it's science missions and pretty much ignores those people as best as possible.

reply to post by ArMaP


Thanks a ton for that, as it actually is the type of explanation I was looking for! Much appreciated, I didn't think that the area of "black" we were selecting wasn't completely neutral and could have tinges of red that effect the rest. I was assuming that it was just pure black.

Thanks again for this explanation.

Originally posted by HIWATT

Originally posted by AkumaStreak
I don't really get what's being implied. That there is grass on the hills? Lighting conditions are obviously not going to be identical as to what we would see on Earth. different planet after all.

Is it?

These "extra terrestrial photos" could easily be 1,000 different places right here on Earth.

Thats what i was thinking everytime i see a mars photo, it could have totaly been shot right here on earth, b/c in my point of view, if your gonna make money off tax payers, you pretend to spend billions of dollars on a mission, but to really make money you grab a camera go to a dessert and take a couple of snap shots and call it mars. BOOM you just saved your self a billion dollars that will go into your own pocket.