It took quite a bit of digging around, but I think I found an image of one of the first rocks of the Burns formation with a purple hue that I noticed. It goes back to sol 657. Take a look at the attachment in this post from the Mogollon Rim thread.

Sol-657, Dec 2005, has it been that long? And that Mogollon Thread, as well as the Mogollon and Olympia and Payson, et al, sites are well worth a read, well worth the review.

And I'll note that the "attached image" is by MMB. Thanks, Mike, again.

I got a chuckle. One response to your post was "Here we are, kneeling on this wonderful outcrop, can't find the handlens or scratch plate, and the carpal tunnel is acting up... ain't life wonderful", and the author of that reply didn't have corrective surgery until 2012.

Check MMB/MP. Another installment of imagery-- looks like Oppy is on the move, and going on the West side of the rim outcrop at Knobby.

--Bill

Talk of purple layers in sandstone has triggered a childhood memory. Digging through the white sands of beaches in the west highlands of Scotland I used to encounter discrete purple layers. Somebody told me at the time these were due to staining by iodine from the seaweed. Thinking back I would have to question this and consider the alternative possibility of gravitational sorting of haematite grains by wave action. On Mars the processes must be totally different but the same colour raises the same questions. Iodine, haematite or something else altogether?

Ancient Roman shipwrecks offshore with slowly leaking wine jars.

Maybe not Romans but Phoenicians . .

We're getting our first good pancam views of the far rim in a while, as part of the long-baseline Nobby sequence. Here's a spectacular view that shouted out "anaglyph me!":

Here are two L257 Pamcam images from panoramas made on Sol-3325 at Sutherland Point.

The first is titled "Sutherland contact" and the second is titled "Sutherland outcrop". Both sites have intriguing lithologies and textures.

--Bill

Sol 3333 panoramics are down

Very cool to be roving again! A nice 3D pano to be had from Sol 3334:



(Full-res at http://i.imgbox.com/adyPwIWF.jpg)

...and beautifully layered structures from Sol 3317:

Here is another "Vertical Exaggeration" panorama (aka "Philovision") of the Navcam pan from Sol-3333. The Central Mound of Endeavour is on the left, Cape Tribulatin in center with the summit of Knobbys Head on the right. You can still orient via the inverted HiRISE image in my post #148.

Interesting oblique view of the downhill wasting process here.

--Bill

Very nice! And here is a reduced-scale version of it with an arrow pointing to a possible new dust devil. That white streak seems to be missing in older images.

Phil

Indeed, the DD does show better in the vertically exaggerated image. It was fairly broad and diffuse and doesn't stand out in the "raw" image. I wonder if this is a new undocumented feature of Philovision or if it is something that we (or some of us) just forgot about?

Anyways, good catch...

--Bill

I think we're still waiting for the documentation from Phil...

Seriously, I don't recall it making it easier to discover DDs. But it does seem to turn a gusty thing into a DD-like thing.

On this post-Cape_York leg of the Traverse there is a program called the "color clast survey", which appears to be an extension of the (apparently) defunct "systematic foreground..." program. This is really a good idea to characterize of the soil along the Traverse route. But they need to make sure that parts of the Rover chassis do not reflect into the camera because this can wreak havoc with the Auto-exposure and make processing the image challenging.

--Bill