Jan's panorama, reprojected. Curiosity moved west a bit and climbed upslope on the lower slope of the butte on sol 2577.

Phil

The MASTcam L view on Sol 2560.

125 images. The original pano is 51.3 MB.

Jan van Driel

Drive on 2582, this end of drive front HazCam indicates a short climb further up-slope at Central Butte, pity most of the MastCams are compressed bayer, some grand geology on show here...

I don't see Mastcam images for that sol. On the raw images page, the most recent Mastcam images are from sol 2577.

Those are the ones I was referring to. Except for a few of the workspace and drive direction MastCams, all recent surveys have been compressed bayer, the green cast (compression artefacts) after repair spoil the images IMHO, so I don't process or share them.

Compressed bayer is there to utterly frustrate any independent effort to illustrate the mission.

It is also very effective at reducing ability & effectiveness for public outreach and education.

Wouldn't it be fun to hear a justification for the use of compressed bayer from someone in authority?

*crickets*

So - just for clarity....... whilst describing those images as 'compressed bayer' is seemingly correct....they are infact an uncompressed image on the ground that has been JPGd for posting online. With the addition of TGO to the UHF relay fleet, the amount of data being returned by MSL has increased substantially in the past year meaning that a lot of MastCam imagery that might previously been returned as debayered color imagery is now returned uncompressed. When that reaches the ground....it is greyscale before processing. Given the policy of releasing 'raw' imagery....taking that uncompressed image and then JPGing it gives us the problematic data we have now. This is not privileged information - with effort, one could ascertain this via the PDS labels.

It's certainly not an intentional effort to 'frustrate any independent effort to illustrate the mission.' That, sadly, is a frustrating side effect of the raw imagery release policy and an abundance of data volume.

It sucks.

As to how one might get that policy changed......I think that's a problem that predates launch and is at the PI level. That said - I have, and continue, to make appeals up the chain of command for a change, even if I know change is unlikely.

It's worth remembering....those terrible JPGS now.....mean in a few months you have entirely uncompressed data landing on the PDS to be enjoyed.

Thanks for the explanation Doug.

It's a shame to have to downgrade our expectation every time Curi drives and postpone our enthusiasm for sharing the journey until a PDS release.

I couldn’t agree more.

The NAVcam L view on Sol 2582.

Jan van Driel

You posted some beautifully deBayered mastcams earlier this year, Sean. You mentioned a GIMP procedure for those, but did it also involve a lot of manual work to clean up artifacts? (I'm not asking how to deBayer - we have a thread for that already.)

Jan's panorama for sol 2582 in circular form. Comparison with the last one shows a small move to the south (uphill).

Phil

It's a lot of extra work to make them, not to mention the qualitative difference with subsequent JPG compression compounding the issue. I would rather spend that time creatively than prepping compromised mosiacs.

When I see bayered sequences now I am more likely to sigh and move on.

Sol 2585: ‘dog’s eye’ mosaic of the target “Sourhope”, roughly assembled in MS-ICE using the single focus images, not sure if we'll get a focus stacked version later.

Sol 2582 Lmastcam: