Responding to CosmicRocker's post in the map thread:

Yes; if there was anything interesting to see in the "dark terrain", it was too subtle at least for me to pick out. Oh well... onward!

Your map is great and it feels like reading an old S/F novel wandering among the stars with big voids of space and nothing to see in between... It's af if we just left Sol (Santa Maria) and are heading towards a red dwarf star with its mysterious planet ("double crater"). We are going to fly-by this planet just before encoutering the red dwarf, but we know that we are are irresistibly drawn by the giant Arcturus (Endeavour)

"if there was anything interesting to see in the "dark terrain", it was too subtle at least for me to pick out."

Not much obvious to see, but the surface was noticeably rougher. Elsewhere we had the extremely smooth surface with tiny ripples, as at Eagle crater. Here we had a generally rougher surface, and to me it looked as if a layer about 10 or 20 cm thick had been eroded away to reveal it. It would be interesting to map the distribution of the darker patches all around this area, to see it the distribution offers clues to its origin.

Phil

I realize that the remaining distance is the same as driving twice around Victoria.
As can understand my french speaking collegues, "autant dire un jet 2 Pi R..."

It was pretty subtle, alright. Honestly, I was expecting it to be significantly more exciting. I'd have to agree with Phil regarding the surface appearing to be rougher. I was pretty much perplexed until it occurred to me that this dark terrain may simply be a large exposure of the Halfpipe formation. Some of us geologizers had previously started a thread devoted to the Halfpipe formation, where it was revealed that the name was informally applied to certain dark patches of coarse material overlying bedrock.

I think one of the best exposures of the "formation" was observed on sols 707-717 as shown in the image I posted almost 5 years ago in the Halfpipe thread. See also, this comment. This is just another reminder about how much fun it has been to do armchair planetary geology through the rover's eyes.

I was mucking about with experimenting with stacking and stitching some images from the latest batch, and, somehow, this came out... not entirely sure how, but I just thought it looked rather striking, so sharing it here...

Nice

Love how the extra details in the "hills" are starting to come out.

The Pancam L2 view on Sol 2563.

Jan van Driel

Nice pan! And here's a match to a HiRISE image. The hoped-for long drive was lost, but there should be a drive today.

Phil

Just briefly going back to my image of the "hills on the horizon", I came across a rather great coincidence. Stella and I went camping on Sunday, to a beautiful nearby lake called Ullswater, and as soon as we had set up camp I started taking pictures, as you do. Breathtaking view from our tent, right across the lake to the hills and mountains beyond...

...and (if I've read it correctly!) checking the always-useful MER filename decoder I found that the images I used to make my "hills on the horizon" pic were taken at just before 3pm on Sunday, Earth time, at exactly the same time I was taking my pics of Ullswater.

Hence, just for fun and novelty value...



Just liked the idea of it, that's all... me, sitting there, by my tent, taking pictures of faraway hills, while Oppy, sitting there in the middle of Meridiani, was doing exactly the same thing...

(colour version of Ullswater pic here )

Very nice juxtaposition Stu.

I remember camping in that vicinity in my student days - don't recall many opportunities to log on though...

Great choice of location, Stu.

Here's The Ullswater, a new measure of scale:



About the same length as Santa Maria to Endeavour!

Andy

That's why I love my mobile's net browsing capability. Sat on the lake shore, glass of red wine *there*, big bag of Butterkist popcorn **there**, and looking at new images of Mars as the Sun went down behind the fells, over ***there***...

Priceless.

I'll spare everyone the pictures of me, aged seven, paddling in Ullswater with a toy boat, but instead I will note that I think the "Ullswater" unit needs recalibrating. The lake is 7-9 miles long (from Wikipedia), and the distance from Santa Maria to Cape York is only about 3.5 miles.

Yeah- only half an Ullswater to go!

John

The horizon drop-off might be analogous though - Mars being a smaller ball etc etc.